Mystery Quilting - Part 1

So Bonnie Hunter has started her Mystery Quilt for 2016!  I'm a huge fan of hers, so I'm excited to sew along in real time with her and all of the other Quiltvillians!  This year's is entitled "En Provence":

Click to go to the "En Provence Mystery" page on Bonnie's blog Quiltville

In the Intro Post, Bonnie has us pick out our fabrics based upon the gorgeous lavender fields she visited in...Provence! 😀 Here are her paint chips for the color scheme:

And here are the fabrics I pulled:

Instead of the magenta "constant" fabric, I picked the light blue w/the purple triangles.  I was really tempted to buy new fabric for this project, but I forced myself to use up my existing fabric...you know, to make more room for new fabric!   Most of these are reproductions, so I'm hoping that will be the overall feel. But I think my yellow is a little too "gold" and not enough "butter"...I'm hoping it will all work out!

I'm also only going to do half of the amounts in the hopes of ending up with a throw-sized quilt.   

So it looks like Bonnie will be posting "Clues" every Friday for us to complete.  Our first part was to make a bunch of 3-inch four-patches out of our neutral fabrics...221 to be exact!

Cutting:

Sewing:

Done:

I ended up with 120.  I love how scrappy and cute they are!  You can check out the progress of the other Quiltvillian participants in the Monday Link-Up.

I'm really going to make an effort to keep up with the clues as they come, but of course there's Christmas gift-making to do, and I volunteered to basically make a quilt for a friend of mine to give to her son.  Can't wait until I can retire and quilt/craft/knit/create full-time...in about 10 years!! 😂😂

I'm Still Here! :-)

I've been gone from blogland, but not gone from quilting!  If you really want to see what I've been up to, please follow me at Instagram HERE - my IG handle is "Liv2KnitnSew"

But here's some stuff I've completed post-Weekender Bag:

 






So, I will try to keep up better, especially because I'm participating in the Bonnie Hunter's Mystery Quilt!  I'm a huge Bonnie fan, so this is going to be fun!  Stay tuned!

Weekender Bag Sew Along - The Grand Finale!

Although I couldn't wait to just move along to the next side and get this thing DONE, one thing held me back:

See how the side pockets aren't even?  The strawberry is higher than the tulip, and although I tried talking myself into not caring, I care. 

So I ripped it out.  This was after I had already sewed it on with no less than 3 passes.  I fudged it a bit, and made the pockets match a little better before sewing it back together again:

I also broke my nail in the process :-(:

Then Pookie helped me mock up my 2nd side:

And I got that bad boy sewn on to get a finished Weekender exterior:

 

Unfortunately, my strawberry looks more like a tomato now, but whatevs :-/

So on to the sewing the lining together!  I did this much the same way I did the exterior:

I totally ignored the weird and fiddly-looking instructions about making a pocket for the stabilizer to put in the bottom of the bag...I couldn't picture it, and I was honestly too tired to figure it out.   Instead, I figured I could just do a false bottom.  So I just sewed the lining together, dropped it into the bag exterior, and then hand-stitched it around the zipper tape.  This was labor-intensive, and my fingers were sore from pushing through the layers of thick fabric/tape, but it fit together perfectly:

Then I made a false bottom by taking some cardboard and mocking up about how big I needed to make the bottom:

Then I used that template to cut out foam board (yes, the kind the kiddos use for presentations!  I got a big piece for a buck at the dollar store) and 2 pieces of lining fabric, which I cut about 1/2" larger than the board all around.  I ironed fusible fleece to the lining fabric for some extra padding:

I sewed the lining fabric pieces wrong sides together on 3 sides, leaving one short side open.  I flipped the whole thing inside-out so the right sides were now facing out, popped the piece of foam board in, folded the open edges down, and sewed them together.  My bottom ended up a smidge larger than my cardboard template, but it worked out just fine:

Voila!  A snug false bottom that isn't shifting anywhere, and which gives my bag a nice firm base:

And a shot of the interior, all sewn in:

I added some ribbons to the zipper pulls, and TA-DA!  My Weekender is finished!

 

And, I finished it in time for my trip to Playa Del Carmen!  I even made a little matching zipper bag out of the scraps:

I can't tell you how proud I am to have conquered this bag.  There are plenty of things I will do differently when I make another (oh yeah, there will be another!), and I'll summarize all that stuff in a future post.  Until then, I'm just going to bask in the glow of accomplishment! :-)

The Weekender - Upper Body Workout Episode

Alright, so I got the side pockets sewn on to the middle zipper panel, so now I need to make the bottom panel:

I decided to steal Annie's idea from the Ultimate Travel Bag Craftsy Class, and I'm using buttons as purse feet.  Other peeps have recommended 6 purse feet, so that's what I did.  I bought big flower buttons, and then used a glue stick to temporarily stick a plain round red button on top to add additional height.  Then I sewed them on using my older/other machine which has all the fancy stitches so I could do a stationary zig-zag in the button holes:

I tried out white & red thread, and although I thought the white was cuter, I also figured it would get dirtier.  Thus I went with red.  I also wanted to point out that I had to eventually rip out and then re-sew the 4 outer buttons so that they were placed farther in toward the center; I didn't realize that the bottom panel actually curves up the side panel after we attach the main panel.  Therefore, they ended up 2 1/2" in from the short edges.  I would recommend doing that the first time :-)

Also, I don't like Amy's fiddly instructions for the bottom.  I read them a few times, and I got tired of trying to figure it out.  So I'm just making the bag bottom with interfaced linen and foam, and at the end will make a false bottom out of foam core for stability.  I think that should work, and will take out that extra crazy sub-step in Step 11 wherein Amy advises that once you get the layered Peltex into the bottom before you sew in the final panel, to take even MORE caution when sewing this thing together.  Yeah, no thank you.

Speaking of layers, take a look at what I got to sew through when I attached the bottom panel to the zipper panel:

That there is 3 layers of Flex Foam, 3 layers of canvas, and 3 layers of interfaced linen.  Surprisingly, my machine only skipped a stitch once, and that was near the middle.  I did squish the material as I went, but I was still pleasantly surprised.

So with the zipper and bottom panels together, I could really see how sturdy this thing is:

So now, on to the infamous Step 11, wherein madness awaits!  Let's sew this thing to a main panel, shall we?

Yeah, fun times.  A word about the clips you see in my pic.  These are knock-off Wonder Clips I got on Amazon at the amazing bargain price of 100 for $10.  I already had 10 of the real WC's from Clover, and loved them so much that I wanted to buy more.  But I'm kind of cheap financially responsible, and I just couldn't spend the kind of money Clover wants for just some plastic clips!  Well.  Some of these cheapo clips popped off during this step and/or slipped off the bottom layer.  I replaced them with the real WC's, and there were no further issues; the grip was tight and sure.  Final thoughts: the Cheapos will be wonderful for normal projects like clipping quilt binding, but for times like this where you're wrangling a gazillion layers of thick materials through your machine, Clovers are the way to go (aka, you get what you pay for).

Anyway, I found out how sewing can qualify as an arm workout.  I thought others were exaggerating when they would claim soreness after this step.  Really?  It's just sewing.  Um, yeah.  Because of the stiffness and bulk of the bag, and the shiftiness of my Cheapo clips, I struck some exquisite yoga poses while trying to keep the raw edges even, keep the needle from going through the cording in the piping on the other side while still staying close to it, squishing down the fabric in front of the needle to prevent skipped stitches, and wrestling the bag body out of the way.   

But I persevered, and once I got that first set of stitches on, it wasn't too difficult (relatively speaking) to go back and identify where I needed to re-do the stitch lines, which was basically everywhere.  I suggest flipping it right side out several times just to make sure that piping is how you want it before you declare this part done:

YAY!  So next post, I should have a completed Weekender exterior to show off! :-)

It's Beginning to Look A Lot Like a Weekender!

Okay, so I'm getting close to only having 1 week left to get this Weekender Bag finished.  I work 10-hour days, with a 1-hour commute each way, so it leaves me very little time during the week to do crafty stuff, but I'm forcing myself to do something, anything, every night on the bag.  It's working because I can finally see this thing coming together!

So I sewed the outer pockets on, then clipped the piping in place:

As I sewed around, my piping started doing the wave thing, because I had mocked it up too loosely:

I ended up un-clipping it and just sewing it on as I went along, kind of like binding a quilt.  The corners are tricky, and a wonderful Weekender genius M. at Three Owls Handmade reached out on Instagram and shared a tip to sew the piping in the bottom corners 1/2" in from the edge (in this pic I was an 1/8" in too far, so I unpicked, pulled it over, and fixed it):

She says this will prevent the piping from being "eaten" when all of the layers are assembled.  She's made 3 Weekenders now, so I believe her!!  Also, she has a fantastic pattern called the Nova Tote, which I've now bought and downloaded for a future project.  You should totally check her out!

Here's a finished pic of the magnetic snap I installed between the pocket & exterior panel.  I placed it about 1 1/2" below the top edge of the pocket and I think it'll be great!

And we have exterior Weekender panels!

 

These guys are already pretty substantial, and are relatively heavy.  This bag is going to be a beast!!

The zipper panel instructions are weird.  You actually sew the outer panel together first, then sew the zipper in blindly, stitching along that mid-seam line as your guide, and then seam-rip the basting apart to expose your zipper.  Say what!?!  I couldn't wrap my mind around this, so I just followed the instructions blindly, and it worked!  So here's what I did:

After sewing & basting the 2 panel pieces together, I clipped the zip in upside down along the middle (the zipper pulls are beneath the tape in this pic).  I tried to clip only the very edge of the tape, because the next step has you sew along either side of that middle seam, and I didn't want to find out what happens if you sew into a clip:

Now, the sewing part.  I used my zipper foot, as per the instructions, but I really should have used my patchwork foot so I could ensure at least a 1/4" seam from the middle.  Because my seam was so close to the zipper teeth, my needle ran into the zipper pulls, and I couldn't get my zipper pulls underneath the presser foot.  I had to stop sewing, take the piece off the machine, pull the pulls to behind the foot, then resume sewing.  After the first time I had to do that, I did this stop/start thing towards the bottom of the tape to hopefully be more hidden:

Well, the problem with sewing blindly, with clips holding your zipper in place underneath the sewing, is that this can happen:

Ugh.  But a pretty simple fix.  When I went to sew down the second side, there was no way I could get the zipper pulls out of the way, because they were "trapped" between the tape and the outside.  So I prematurely ripped some of my basting stitches to free the pulls, then finished sewing the little bit I had left:

Whew!  Like everything else with this bag, it's not difficult, just...INVOLVED!  But after slicing through the rest of the basting stitches (which was actually kind of fun, like unwrapping a present), and clearing away the thread confetti (which was definitely not fun), look at this:

Super-profesh, if I do say so myself!  However, because the seams under there were so bulky, they didn't fold under as nicely as they should have.  So I added a second set of stitches to keep those bad boys out of the way:

And that, my friends, is the zipper panel!  Now I've got the side pockets clipped on and ready to be sewn:

BTW, I used a 30" double-zip from ByAnnie. Check her out, she's a bag-maker extraordinaire!  I bought her class on Craftsy "The Ultimate Travel Bag", and it looks fantastic like the Weekender, but easier to construct, especially with her holding your hand the whole way through.  Buy it from the link on her website HERE and you can get it for 50% off...it's so worth the $20, and the pattern is included, which is $10 on its own.  Seriously, this is one of the best Craftsy classes I've bought (I like the 2 by Camille Roskelley the best, though, because she's like a quilting rockstar and I'm a total Thimble Blossoms/Bonnie & Camille groupie!).  The pace is perfect, and Annie gives clear explanations and fantastic tips.  Not affiliated, yadda yadda, but it's really great!  Okay commercial over, and now back to your regularly scheduled programming...