In the mood for bags

Don't know about you, but I find that bags are extraordinarily difficult to choose. I have been looking around for a simple tote bag for some time and let me tell you there are hundreds of free patterns on the web...you would think that I would find one relatively quickly. So far I narrowed it down to about three bags. Lucky for me I am not that skilled in sewing hence have to look for those that are more simple to construct.

There is a lovely Market Tote Tutorial over at Bijou Lovely, also another one at the Pellon website by Amy Smart

Then I found a pattern on Craftsy that I really liked, the 'Quilted Tote Bag' by RebeccaMaeDesigns.

RebeccaMaeDesigns: Quilted Tote Bag

So I decided that I needed some special fabric for that...

Could not find anything in my stash...actually finding that my taste in fabric is somewhat changing, influenced by the many bright fabrics that are around. My fabric stash carries mainly darker, more muted colours, so off it was to the fabric store. Here are the supplies that I purchased:

Gorgeous bag fabric

Gorgeous mix of fabrics...all on special, of course, and also bought some hardware. The bag has a magnetic closure and also a zippered pocket. This will be very interesting.

Also had a look at some duck cloth the other day and purchased some modern Cloud9 fabric (they had some great designs!) and went ahead and whipped up the Twenty Minutes Tote bag by The Purl Bee for my daughter. She has been running around with this awful canvas bag, so I wanted to quickly trial this bag. 

The Twenty Minute Tote by The Purl Bee

This took me about an hour and a half and was great fun to put together. The bag has no lining andI spent most of my time overlocking the exposed seams...the pattern uses a zigzag stitch but I thought I may as well use what I have on the machine...this worked really well! Also using the Stop/Start function on the machine (Pfaff 4.2) more and more...just pressing a button and then have the machine go at a constant speed, allows you to fully concentrate on keeping the line of sewing nice and straight. Planning to do another one or two of these (of course I bought more of this duck cloth) and making the bag a little bit bigger...find it very hard to judge what size of a bag I need/want. Having done it, I am more able to judge how much bigger I do want it in width and length.

No wonder I am not getting any quilts done...I continually get side tracked. For some reason, this year has been particularly bad for this.

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Karin