Sewing – Page 21 – The Craft Room

Bags Bags Bags! 2: The out and about hip bag

I told you there’d be more bags didn’t I 🙂

I’ve discovered that for all those people that you don’t know what to buy – a bag is just right!

This one I made for my Mother-In-Law’s birthday. It comes from a pattern shop I found on etsy.

I’m quite impressed with how this one turned out. It’s my first attempt with a zip – so the first time I’ve experimented with the zipper foot on my sewing machine!

Let’s have a look at it:

It has a long strap secured to nice shiny silver D-rings.

It has boxed corners at the bottom.

It has not one zip, but two – one on the top for the main compartment and one into a pocket on the front.

Doesn’t it look cool?! I like it so much I’m going to make myself one – after I finish the long list of other bags on my list! I may end up with quite a bag collection if I carry on like this…

Bags Bags Bags! 1: The show-off bag

I’ve got a long list of bags to make on my to-do list. This was the very first one I’ve made (that’s sewn, I did make the crochet owl bag a while back) but is likely to be first of many bag posts 🙂

I made this bag for my Mum’s birthday (which was yesterday, so it’s safe to post photos now!). I used the Showoff Bag PDF Sewing Pattern which can be purchased from Made by Rae. It took me ages walking round the fabric shop to pick a fabric I though would look good for the big bottom panel, and decided on this pretty bird fabric. The top panel needs to be a thicker material than cotton really and cord was all I had in the cupboard at home. I compared the birdie fabric with lots of colours and the green was the best match, so it’s bright but looks quite good!!

Inside I put a pocket on both sides, and the top is quite simple as it doesn’t have any zip or snap closure.

I learnt quite a few new things along the way: what a baste stitch is, how to box the corners, and that actually, bags aren’t as hard to make as I’d got them down to be 🙂

So here it is, my first bag!

Walking Foot Wonder!

Wow!

I've heard people talking plenty about this thing called a walking foot, but I've never really understood what it did or thought seriously about getting one, until now.

Starting making quilts and listening to others talking about how they're going to quilt the tops of theirs made me start looking at what my sewing machine feet are really all for. I had a good play on the machine trying them all out along with all the different stitches that it can do and then started browsing the internet to find out what other feet were out there. There I found a quilters pack of feet on ebay which I snapped up. It gave me 4 new feet, and one of them was the walking foot above.

I've been making some bunting (very slowly, I've had so many problems making it that it gets put to one side until I feel up to giving it another go!) and the latest problem was the tape along the top was not flat once it had been sewn on and looked generally rubbish. I decided to give it one more go, this time with the walking foot (it's first outing on the sewing machine) and could not believe the difference! Look how flat and proper it looks now:

I was about to say it's my new favourite foot, but I've also been playing with the one that does free motion which is rather cool too, so I'll have to go with 'I love my sewing machine'! 😀

Crafty Bums Quilt Along 2012

I seem to be in a bit of a joining in with things mood this year!

Along with the blankets, I'm also joining in with the Crafty Bums Quilt Along 2012. You can read about it on their blog. Crafty Bums is new website, a bit like a UK Etsy for handmade things in the UK, and once I find myself back in a position to make things to sell (i.e. back in the UK) I will have my own shop on there too!

I've had the fabric for the quilt ready for a couple of weeks and finally got around to cutting the squares for the first block today. It was the first time I'd used a rotary cutter too – gosh that was harder to use than I was expecting! But after several attempts I have begun to master the technique and have all the squares cut out and ready to sew.

It's gone 11pm now, so probably not the best time to try following instructions sewing them together, so I'll leave getting the sewing machine out and finishing it off for another day.

Also today we bought a new camera so I've been testing it out. I've learnt two things: 1) Having a camera with a flash (as opposed to just my phone camera) means I can take photos at night – hurrah, and 2) Green is not a good colour for photographing under a flash – it comes out yellow!

Here is my photo of my squares laid out in the positions I'll sew them in 🙂