The Incredible Upside-Down Bag

Hi all -

I was lucky enough to spend this past long weekend (Thurs-Sun) on a quilting retreat at a friend's cabin in Red Feather Lakes, CO. It was a beautiful setting and a wonderful place to make some progress on some projects. In this post, I'm going to talk about the set of bags that I was able to finish on the retreat.

I think I've mentioned that my oldest sister has also become a quilter. I thought the perfect Christmas gift for her would be the set of bags in the Thread Dispenser/Sewing Case 2.0 pattern by byAnnie. I had originally planned on making these bags from my stash, but then I decided that I really wanted to make them out of Eiffle Tower fabrics, since that's where her husband proposed to her. I was excited to find the perfect fabrics on fabric.com.

The fabrics I got for both the inside and outside of the bags were directional so I knew I had to be careful to make sure that they didn't end up being upside-down. I spent a lot of time thinking about how this had to be done before starting the bag and I felt confident that I had it figured out. So, of course, I screwed it up and the main bag is upside-down. I now know that the key is that the outside fabric and the lining fabric have to face in opposite directions when you sandwich everything before quilting! Now to see if I can remember that for next time......

But I'm still happy with the bags. Here's a picture of both of the bags together, showing how well they match each other:

Pretty cool, huh? Got to love the incredible upside-down bag:

It has a lot of wonderful pockets on the inside:

(It looks crooked in the picture, but it really is straight. At least I got that part right!) The pattern had the bigger pocket on the bottom also made out of vinyl, but I thought it would be good to have a mesh pocket instead. And here is the outside of the bag, just so you can see the wonderful fabric:

Isn't that a pretty fabric when it's rightside-up?

The little bag is also pretty cute:

This one doesn't have a front or back, so it didn't matter what direction I put the fabric:

And it has a couple more pockets on the inside:

I think these will make a cute gift that she can make good use of.

We also have had our first taste of winter this week. We got several inches of snow overnight on Sunday and it continued to snow lightly most of the day on Monday. But it's supposed to be pretty nice tomorrow so it should all disappear by the end of the week.

I hope you are all enjoying autumn!

Nancy