241 tote

I had a day off of work and I wanted to make a gift for a graduating senior. That means a trip to the fabric store to make a tote bag.

The flower print and blue dots are Denyse Schmidt's fabric at JoAnn's (no idea what line).  The green with white polk-a-dots is just a random fabric I found there.  Saturday night was spent cutting out fabric and interfacing.

I decided to use Anna's (Noodlehead) 421 tote bag pattern.  I've made it before, but after seeing Suzanne's (just another hang up) version I knew I needed to make it again.  I added 1" to the center of the bag and added fleece interfacing.  I adore how they turned out.

I interfaced the outside of this bag with Pellon's 'decor bond' and the lining with fusible fleece.  You can't see it, but the lining is the blue print and the handle is the flower fabric.



For this bag, I added 'decor bond' to both the outside and lining plus fusible fleece.  (I wanted to find out if it made any difference or not.)  This bag is a little more stiff ... but not by much.  It's lined in the green print and the strap is the flower print on the outside and green on the inside.  [It's hard to get pictures of the strap when it's hanging on the fence!]  Just for fun, I added the outside zipper pocket.  Thanks to my handy-dandy glue stick, it was a piece of cake to put in.  I think I'll like it for stashing my keys.  There really isn't anything worse than having to dump out your bag just to find your keys that are hiding in the bottom.

I hope my graduating senior friend loves her bag.

in progress: hst triangle quilt

It's time to pick a layout for my hst (half square triangle) quilt.  The fabric is Tula Pink's 'nest' fabric.  What's your favorite?

Option #1 - "Delightful" (pattern by Aneela Hoey)  Aren't the pinwheels fun?

Option #2 -  diamonds.  (The pattern of the original quilt that I saw in the Bloggers Quilt Festival and fell in love with.)

Option #3 - 'arrows'

Option #4 - stacked triangles (or rotate them 45 and let them be rows of triangles?)

Option #5 -lots of diamonds

Option #6 - windmill whimsy

Option #7 - triangles in formation (yes, I'm all out of names)

Option #8 - zig -zag (uh, with one square flipped wrong!)

So, sister of mine, what layout should it be?

quilt finish: postage stamp

It's finished!  My postage stamp quilt that I mentioned here is finished.  I absolutely love it.

I've been referring to this quilt as 'my experimental' quilt.  I ironed all of the seams open (first time ever!), I pinned very carefully, I used a cotton batting (another first), and I machine quilted it (second time).  As experiments goes, this one was a success.

It took me two tries at pin basting to get it just right.  Next time I'm going to make sure to make the back at least 2 inches bigger on all sides.  I pin based starting at the bottom - thinking I had enough fabric ... and was 1/4" short at the top.  I resisted the urge to stretch the fabric and unpinned the entire thing.  [I used this tutorial at Oh Fransson! to learn how to pin baste.]

I was going to use two layers of 'warm-n-natural' batting, but my sister convinced me to only use one.  I thought it would be more 'poofier' (just pretend that's a word) with two layers and show off the quilting better.   I'm glad I just used one.  It crinkled ever so nicely after a trip through the washer and dryer.  Plus, it's surprisingly warm!  (Yup, all of my other quilts have a polyester batting.)

For quilting, I stitched down 1/4" away from every seam.  It sounds like a lot of quilting, but it only took 4 evenings to get it all done.  The first night was the slowest with stopping every few seconds to remove the safety pins.

I did have to bend the metal on my 1/4" acufeed foot to keep the guide from catching on the seams.  I tried to just lift it up with some toothpicks wedged in there and then paper - but it worked best to just slightly bend it up.

I also purposely set the speed slow so that I could keep the seams as straight as possible.
 

sorry!   Taken at night with very crappy lighting ... but the quilting is pretty.

d just enough squares left over to put a stripe across the back.  I love it.  (And yes, I pinned every seam intersection with straight pins and safety pins to get the quilting straight across.)  I think the solid back shows off the quilting.

I didn't get a good picture of the crinkliness (yes, another made-up word), but trust me - it has the perfect amount of crinkle.  I can't think of anything I'd change about it.  It's just perfect in every way.