Heavenly Hemp

My resolution not to use plastic bags is going quite well and recently I've been thinking about Christmas (I know I know it is far far too early) .... but my thought was that wrapping paper is kind of a waste too and why not just make beautiful gift bags to present your presents in that they can be reused and reused and reused. After all - Santa just uses one big sack no? And it was Santa's sack that made me think of making reusable gift bags for this years pressies.

So on a recent trip to JoAnn's (have you seen the price of fabric at that place? choose carefully and you can save SO much cash while adding to your material stash ... perhaps that is bad advice to all you material addicts!) I purchased some hemp (cream and brown) and here are my first attempts at reusable gift sacks. (These are just the first version of the wine bottle sacks - I'm working on much bigger sacks too.)
Each little sack as a felt applique image and embroidered message ...
It was so bright and sunny outside that I thought myself crazy for making Christmas goodies and the sun and the texture of the hemp made me think of straw beach bags ... and straw made me think of bunnies and then I was off and made this ... my rabbit hutch bag ... I know it doesn't look like a rabbit or a hutch but it was named after my thoughts of sunny straw and bouncy bunnies ...
... and I'm really not a big bag person so I'm not sure why I keep making bags but there was something about this one that made me feel happy and smiley. Perhaps it was the polka dots? or the little felt flower with sparkles ...
... or perhaps it was just the love I have of making things that got to me.

Bikinis, Bags and Bunnies

I am very lucky and I have just been sailing in the sun for a week - and while I was really excited about getting away - I hate bikinis ... they fill me with terror ... that photo of you on holiday, in the bikini, with hot pink sunscreen greasy skin ... that bikini photo doesn't remind you of the lovely week away but only reminds you that you need to stop eating those cookies! So I feel safe now - back in my snow gear ..... (not really get me back into that sunshine!!)

Some time ago last year I made some baby patchwork quilts ... there were actually supposed to be 3 in the set - but the third went really horribly wrong. After my sewing lesson with Bernie at the sewing machine shop where the instructor said "I never quilt with a straight stitch - I always use a decorative stitch" ... I felt confident that I was going to produce something wonderful. Little did I know that the decorative stitches do not always look perfect when using a walking foot ..... in fact they don't look very decorative at all. So I was left with a baby quilt which looked rather deformed due to the strange decorative stitch that I had plastered all over it. The stitch was so tight that there was no hope in removing it ........

So never to be defeated (don't believe a word of that because I was in full whimper mode yesterday evening) ... and never to be one to waste material .... I set about transforming the rather ugly quilt into a quilted bag. Da da .... here it is .... and to my surprise it really is a bag! (i.e. it looks like a bag and functions like a bag!) It measures 18.5" long and it is 11" wide.
I've also been waiting for a delivery of cotton batting to finish some baby quilts. I'm making four! One is brown and gold and the other three are blue ... but they are all "on a theme" (yes it is a bunny theme). The blue quilts are made from recycled cotton blue shirts (its amazing how much material is in a shirt!) ..... so stay posted for those baby quilt results ..... but while I was waiting for the batting - I sewed together some scraps of material left over from the brown/gold baby quilt - grabbed a bit of left over batting from another project and made a quilted tote! I can not tell you how easy this tote was to make. And again - to my surprise - it really is a bag!
I'll try to write down these patterns and have them up on my website soon.