Hi all -
I hope everyone is doing well and had a wonderful Halloween! As usual, the time is flying by! As much as I like having the mornings lighter after the time change, I'm dreading the dark evenings. I did get a new Cricut floor lamp last spring that lights up my sewing area really well so maybe evening sewing won't be so difficult this year. It worked well last night.
This week I finished my Ultimate Travel Bag designed by ByAnnie.
 |
| Ultimate Travel Bag - Front |
 |
| Ultimate Travel Bag - Back |
The bag has a bunch of pockets on the outside and has one of those straps on the back keeps it secure on the handle of a rolling bag. There are some mesh pockets on the inside, too.
 |
| Ultimate Travel Bag - Inside Mesh Slip Pockets |
 |
| Ultimate Travel Bag - Inside Mesh Zippered Pocket |
I'm planning to put the supplies that I take to sew days and retreats in this bag since my sewing machine is in a rolling case. I should be able to just secure this bag to the top of the case when taking things to and from the car.
While I had my suff out for making the travel bag, I decided to also make a Clam Up bag also designed by ByAnnie. I had a cheap kit for this bag, too, that I'd picked up years ago, but I decided to use my own fabric for this bag since the fabric in the kit was boring for a bag, but good semi-solids for use in other projects. I found a fun water drops fabric in my stash to use instead.
 |
| Clam Up Bag - Fabric and Quilting |
The pattern says that you can either quilt the outer fabric and stabilizer or you can leave it unquilted. I like the stability of the quilted fabric better in my bags so I quilted it. I had fun playing with a special stitch on my sewing machine. I thought this stitch had a water drop feel. I used painter's tape to mark straight lines on my quilt sandwich 2" apart and sewed a line of the special stitch along each. Then I did another line of the special stitch halfway between each stitched line. Finally, I felt the fabric needed more quilting to get the stiffness that I wanted, so I added a line of straight stitching between each special stitching line. The result was exactly what I wanted. Here is the finished bag:
 |
| Clam Up Bag - Outside |
 |
| Clam Up Bag - Inside |
This little bag is easy to make, but has some nice features. The flat bottom makes the bag stand up easily on its own. The pleats on the sides will keep things in the bag and add a nice finishing detail.
I also did some work on the diamond border for my "Tulips Are Blooming" quilt from the "Floral Bouquet" pattern in the "Jelly Roll Quilts" book by Pam and Nicky Lintott. I had said last week that I was going to leave this for another retreat, but I have a bunch of white solid fabric in my project bag for this quilt and I decided that I want to get that back into my stash. I also felt like working on the math I needed to do for this border. So I cut a bunch of the fabric and started sewing pieces together.
 |
| Tulips Are Blooming - Diamonds Border |
First, I had to figure out the size of the squares of background fabric I needed so I could get the quarter square triangles needed for this border. I needed quarter square triangles to get stability along the length of the border, especially since the squares are on point and so have bias along the length of the border. You can't use the formula for cutting quarter square triangles for quarter square triangle blocks because these quarter square triangles are used differently. I also know that I am terrible at precision cutting quarter square triangles, so I did the math and added a good buffer for trimming and came up with needing 4.5" squares to make the triangles that I needed. I made a couple of test units and saw that this would work for me, then sewed multiple units together so that I could measure the final size of the diamonds in the border to calculate the number of diamonds I need for each border. Now that this part of the math is done, I can make the borders. Then I'll measure the final size of the borders and use the dimensions of the center of the quilt to figure out how wide to make the white borders that are between the center of the quilt and the diamond border so that everything will fit together perfectly. Luckily, I really enjoy playing with numbers!
Finally, I did some evening work on my Kalme Throw designed by DeBrosse.
 |
| Kalme Throw |
As usual, it's hard to see the progress, but I did get several more inches done. Someday, I'll have another soft blanket to cuddle under when watching TV!
Nancy
