Bag Accompli, and the Creek Do Rise

I'm a little late getting to my blog post this morning because I spent the last couple of hours assembling the patchwork quilted Moda Portugal bag. As always with these kinds of projects, the details take the most time. I finished the quilting last night, and I put it all together, both before and after exercising this morning (it's interesting to listen to a *new* book on the treadmill- usually I have the TV on, muted with closed captioning, just in case something happens that I need to pay attention to. But with The Man Who Knew Too Much, I had to turn the TV off and really listen to the story, since I don't know what's coming.).

This is a large bag- approx 16" square, without the 4" sides and bottom, and it took almost a yard of fabric for the lining, interior pocket, straps and ties. My husband will cut a thin wooden piece to fit in the bottom of the bag, to hold the shape, but the shape is doing pretty well already because I reinforced the edges with a machine seam, and added ties to the upper sides. I dug through my collection of lampwork buttons (made when I was obsessed with lampwork-I have serial obsessions, if you hadn't noticed), and found 4 that go perfectly with the colors on the bag, which added a bit of interest, and coincidentally covered the application of the straps.

As I mentioned earlier, my patchwork and quilting skills are far from perfect (I like the term *rustic*), but I really love how this bag came out. I have enough fabric from the precut squares and the fat quarters for the outside of another bag (especially since I plan to scale the size down a bit, I think 14" square is plenty big enough). I think I'll try some strip quilt blocks next. And of course, I bought more fabric on eBay, which will be arriving soon. And a leather thimble (I'm tired of using bandaids on my poor, sore finger).

On another subject entirely, Turtle Creek, which runs behind our house, rose well over a foot yesterday. It's already a good 10-15 feet above its usual level. This is nothing compared to the thaw of '97, when the entire peninsula was flooded, but that's still a lot of water running through a usually tranquil channel. We're safe, our house is up and away from the water, but there may be some problems downstream. I stitched 4 photos together for this panorama shot, which was taken last night. When the water goes back down, I'll do another. Ditto, if the water rises.