Friday Night Sewing

Most every Friday night, my friend Samantha and I have our weekly speakerphone sewing session. Sadly, she and her family moved to New York from here in Florida a few months ago. Some weeks we work on our Farmers Wife Blocks, and when it’s about to come due, we work on our monthly $6 block.  This week we decided to do something new and make a little bag.

The pattern is the Buttercup Bag from the Made by Rae blog. The pattern was free (bonus!) and was pretty easy to follow. It has a magnetic snap enclosure and the lining is a solid pink that matches the flowers on the outside of the bag. The only modification I made was to sew the handle into the bag versus adding it at the end.  The bag is pretty small, but would be fine to stuff into my file drawer at work. There is a pattern available to make the bag larger that you can purchase.   I would definitely make this bag again, but would probably enlarge it and add some interfacing to make it a little less flimsy. Of course, heavier outside fabric would do that too.  Overall, I’m quite pleased with how it turned out.  You can check out Samantha’s bag over at her blog, Sweet Tea & Grits, it’s super cute!

In other news, I joined the Mug Rug Adventure 3 swap on Flickr.  It’s a holiday themed swap where you choose the holiday you would like your rug to reflect.  There’s still time to sign up so if you want to join in the fun, head on over to the Flickr group and sign up!

A Quick Little Project

We were quite busy this weekend between a trip to IKEA and our regular errands, but I did manage to whip up a little bag.

I wanted something small that I could take with me to my evening exercise class. I needed something that would hold my keys and my class membership card, and that I could shove in the little cubby in the changing room without worrying about it.  I think this little pouch will do the trick!  The main part of the bag came from a Heather Ross fat quarter and the band, handle and lining are from Denise Schmidt’s line at Joann’s.  The bag came together really quickly and was quite easy.  The free tutorial can be found here.

New Friends

I received the friendship bracelets today as part of the Friendship Bracelet Swap, and boy did I luck out!  I received three and I love every one of them! 

Thanks so much Nikki and Cassie! Nikki even has a tutorial for making a super cute bracelet here.  

One More…

Block #47  Homemaker

This block was quite a challenge because for starters, I followed the pictures in the book and did not actually follow the instructions.  Once I realized that the block wasn’t going to go together as planned, I ripped it out and tried by following the written instructions.  The second try went much smoother but you can see I have two little puckers in the fabric, not to mention when it gets sewn into the quilt I’m going to lose some of those points. 
On a side note, today I took on another side project and created a DIY light box in the hope that I will be able to take some better photos for the blog.  I think the photo of the block above is an improvement but I still have some tweaking to do.  Anyone have any suggestions or tips on how I can get it brighter?  I’ve been toying with the exposure control but haven’t quite found the right balance yet.

More Farmer’s Wife Love

I finally got around to adding a few more to my FW block collection.  I’ve  been chipping away at the blocks along with my friend Samantha and  here are the newest additions:

While I fully realize that none of these fabrics particularly go together right now, I’m hoping that mixed into 110 blocks there will be some sort of cohesion.  I must admit that I’m quite jealous of all of the beautiful blocks people are making with brighter, modern fabrics.  Unfortunately I don’t have much of a stash and a lot of the fabrics I have were given to me.  I decided to make this quilt completely scrappy and since I’ve discovered that my local quilt shop has a huge scrap bin where you buy by the ounce, I’m going to continue along with mostly traditional fabrics and own it.  I’m a little nervous about that postage stamp block fitting in but I’m going with it.