The Gym Bag

So you’re walking around in a store looking for something and a curtain catches your eyes. It’s a roller blind so it’s not like you can use it in a quilt, but it has the logo of your precious grandchild's favourite soccer team all over it.

Of course you purchase it, because there is only one left and you get it really cheap as the hanging hardware thingies are long gone. You carry it home and look at it.

Ah. Can you see it? It’s a gym bag/soccer practice bag in the making. Of course!

You remove everything non-fabric, cut it apart, add a little cotton fabric as the material is too stiff to be drawn together, and voila

 

 

 

you have an awesome drawstring gym bag that will make a little boy the envy of his soccer mates. I can't wait to see him opening this on Christmas Eve.

 

I have more curtain material left, so there might be a couple of best mate gym bags in my future - or maybe something totally different. We’ll see, but I’m sure I’ll have fun figuring it out.

Thanks for stopping by!

Designer Showcase and Big Pink

Good morning to you all on this first Friday of October!

First of all I am happy to share that SewCalGal is doing a Designer Showcase about me today. When she first asked me whether I would like to be a part of her series, I was delighted, and today it’s live. Yeey! She’ll do such beautiful introductions that I admit to getting a bit teary eyed when I read through the draft. The showcase post also includes a Mrs Moen pattern giveaway running to the end of this month. Pop over and check it out for yourself, you’ll find it here.

And I am also happy to tell that I finished the Big Pink toilet bag yesterday.

As some of you know, I haven’t made a lot of zippered projects, but I used the same tutorial as when making the Bieber makeup bag and it went together like a charm. I hope it's big enough.

It is heavily quilted with my snakes quilting pattern which I teach in the Quilta Figurer free motion quilting class.

 

You’ll find noodlehead’s tutorial here.

Even though my quilting friends effortlessly go through yards and yards of zippers and have offered teaching me how they do it, none of them were familiar with this particular method.

Looks like I have to teach them this one. Ha, who knew.)

I have almost finished the prep work for next weekend’s classes at Vestlandstreffet in Molde, so I’m thinking of making a Halloween project next. I have always wanted to make one, even though we don’t celebrate Halloween, but first, a weekend with the grandboys!

Have a wonderful weekend and thanks for stopping by!

Brag Day

Sure, I can do zippers.

Don’t ask how many times I had to sew this one on, but daughter’s new makeup bag is already put to good use.

The gorgeous pink flowery fabric is from a tiny thrifted tablecloth.

And while on the subject of bragging, we’ve got this little fellow. Daughter has a photographer friend who took this portrait last week (posted with her and his permission).

I love how those little baby faces change every minute.

Being grandma of one fantastic boy is amazing; two is no less than a miracle.

Happy Day

One of the smaller (and so far quite pleasing) bumps this week is that there’s a major public service strike going on here, and thus grandson’s kindergarten is closed, and might stay closed for weeks. They are staying with us for a while, and all of you who have ever shared your life with a little one know that working with one of them around your feet is not always that easy, especially when you really have to focus or use a rotary cutter. It’s also a great excuse to put everything aside and enjoy the day, which I’m happy to do these days, so yesterday grandson and I went for a little surprise trip.

He loves playing fireman, reading books and watching Fireman Sam, so looking at the fire trucks would be fun. To my surprise we were invited into the fire station, and he got to sit in a fire truck,hold the hose and take pictures with a helmet on. The fire fighters were so incredible nice, that I don’t know which one of us enjoyed it the most. Grandson, who’s usually talking up a storm, was speechless, just nodding or shaking his head to their questions, totally overwhelmed. Happy, happy day; I’m still grinning like a crazy person.-)

I also had a wonderful time with my friendly little sewing group on Wednesday night, it cheered me up immensely. We were talking about going to the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham, UK next year; and I would really love that, it is such a fun group of amazing ladies. I managed to finish the two bags between all the talking and laughing, and both daughter and grandson are happy with the result.

My first Make Do Month ended on Wednesday and I have started on my second without putting much thought into the decision. I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything, and it will take me a while (or a decade, whichever comes first) to make a dent in my stash, so it feels right. With a possible quilting festival in sight, the motivation is even higher to avoid shopping sprees.

Have a wonderful weekend!

I’ll be linking this up to Amylou’s Sew & Tell.

Mooing with bags

For this week’s show and tell I have the 4 remaining Moo Point (a cow’s opinion; doesn’t matter; it’s moo) quilts from this post. The fist one was finished last week for my 200th post giveaway (which is open until May 9th).
"Moo Point No2""Moo Point No3""Moo Point No 4""Moo Point No5"They are all made from a fabulous old (vintage??) green table cloth. Green is a colour I don’t use much, so I’m trying working it into my palette.


I also finished 3 more shopping bags and have thus finished my pledged dozen plus two more.

Most of them are gone by now, but I have a few left for myself. I will never, ever prepare that many (28; yep – it’s crazy and boooring) of anything again! It’s quite discouraging to know that you still have just as many left to finish when you have worked your way through the mother load of shopping bags.

I also finished the “Name quilt: Markus” for a baby boy and “Swan Lake” for the Monthly Design Challenge over at Finki’s this week.

Now I will link this up to show & tell at Amylou’s and Blue Cricket Design's, pop over and have a look at all the wonderful finishes of the week.

Dancing with bags

I have been making more “Dance in the rain” quilts. I made the first ones a couple of years ago and gave them to some special people in my life. The new ones have the text printed onto Lutradur – much easier on the old hands. The background fabric is a well washed and worn linen table cloth. No surprise there, huh? I just love the different textures together; the old linen, the traditional quilter’s cottons and the modern Lutradur.

The dark orange
The turquoise
The brown
I’ll probably use them as gifts; it’s nice to have some small quilts ready for a visit or party. I have also been thinking about selling some of my small pieces on Etsy. I have had some requests, but I have been very hesitant so far. I want to keep the joy of quilting, the fun, the playing and experimenting, but sooner or later I have to face the fact that I cannot keep all my little experiments; probably sooner than later. What is your experience with selling your work on Etsy; will it be a suitable place for my type of work?

I am also one step closer to the goal of finishing a dozen shopping bags as I finished these 4 on my friendly little sewing group on Wednesday; 3 blues and a colourful soccer bag for grandson for toting clothes and stuff to kindergarten.

He loves it, so I might have to make a smaller one for him to play with as well. With the first batch of 7, I have only 1 more to finish for now. I have another batch of 12 that I’ll finish later, some of them are already in progress. Although I’m a more than a bit bored with them, they are great projects during my sewing group time – not much thinking and more time for talking.-)

Now I’ll link this to Amylou’s Sew & Tell; pop over and have a look at all the fabulous projects.

Glass houses

I have been playing with the green linen table cloth, Lutradur and some of the new fibres.It did not turn out quite as I wanted, but I still like the idea and will try again.


The hair curly thingy- and shoe bags for mom’s birthday are finished, and way ahead of time. Yeeey. I have used the squares from the Treasure Box. They were left over from a pair of travel bags which I made for my parents in 2008, so she’ll have a colour coordinated travel set.

I’ll link this up to Amylou’s Sew & Tell if she’s up early; make sure you check out the other finishes of the week anyway.

With my favourite little chick, a little cut and bruised like her owner, I’m wishing you all a wonderful Easter. I will take some time off from the blog to spend (what looks to be grey and rainy) time with my family. See you all over the weekend!

Sew In No 2

I never thought this day was coming, but the dreaded silk purse is finished. It did not even take that long – a few hours in the afternoon and a trip to the local quilt shop (which included a nice dinner with husband; love Fridays!) – and the purse is ready for MIL’s 70th birthday on Monday.
I took some pictures during the process for a how-to, but unless I start a new blog called Mrs Moen How-not-tos, I’d better leave it up to those experiences purse makers.

The first thing I tried was fusible interfacing highly recommended by many friends. That did not stick, the silk was too slippery. I fixed that one by sewing wonky horizontal lines through silk and interfacing.
The next thing I tried was fusing the batting to the interfacing. The interfacing bubbled and stretched, but the batting stuck - kind of. I fixed that one by quilting vertical lines through all 3 layers.
The next steps were easy and included a zillion little bits of silk threads everywhere, but at last I had a quilted silk rectangle and a black cotton lining rectangle unintentionally decorated with colourful clingy silk. Somehow those two pieces magically turned into a finished bag without too much trouble.

The plan was to make the bag with 3 pieces so that nothing would be upside down. This plan was abandoned rather quickly, I believe somewhere between trying the fuse the interfacing and stitching it. This means that the back side is upside down. Oh well!
The silk being so delicate, I did not really want a handle, so the lovely staff member at the shop suggested a round polyester ribbon. It fits the purse perfectly, goes all around the flap (lid??) and is stitched in the sides so that she can adjust the length or remove it if she wants. The magnetic button thingie was the perfect way to close the bag, not visible on the front.
I do hope she will like it !

"Ball of fire"

I have finally got the Make a shape tutorial I promised you in the OWOH post done, and I have even finished a quilt with the sample, “Ball of fire”.
The quilting did not exactly turn out the way I wanted. It was supposed to look like fire, but the red centre is so visually strong that the quilting fades into the background. I also learned a lesson about off centre designs. Make sure it really is off centre even after cleaning up your edges, or it just looks like you have done a mistake. As usually, I have bound the quilt, and will keep it with my other little lessons learned; I like to look at them.

I have also finished 7 of the shopping bags on my to-do-list. I know we are supposed to aim high, but I think I aimed a little too high with these.

Long story short: I bought 3 different fabrics last spring and promised my family I would make them shopping bags. I cut the yardage into rectangles, 28 of them, made some handles from leftover fabric, bought webbing for the rest of them; and was all ready to go. I made one bag and got bored. The last couple of months I have been working on them in between other projects. Sewing a few of them in steps make them tolerable.

They are very simple, but they all have French seams in the sides

and those little ear flaps at the inside

that make square corners on the bottom. Some have fabric handles,

some have webbing handles,

all off them secured with an extra x-seam.
They turned out fine. I gave the grey/pink ones to daughter and will send the blue ones to my parents as soon as I finish some more.

Now I'll pop over and add this to Amylouwho's Sew & Tell.