Tuesday, April 21, 2009

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.

4 comments:

Geek Knitter said...

Beautiful bag, love the buttons.

Here's hoping the creek stays where it's supposed to be!

joannamauselina said...

The bag is really fab! I have made myself several, and the perfect bag is harder to make than one would think. This one looks pretty perfect.

Fríða said...

pretty, pretty!
best wishes from Iceland
Frida

LizzieHelen said...

The bag turned out real cute! I love the buttons and the ties. Inspiration--though you'd think I had enough totes already...but, the County Fair is coming up in a few months...hmmmm.