How I made my latest hand bag

Since I haven't gotten to work in my studio for a while, I thought I'd look through my pictures of some of the work I did last summer. Here is the process I used for my latest bag. I'm glad I decided to take pictures of the steps that I took.

First, I started with random digging through my stash of scraps. I like to look through my scraps rather than full pieces of fabric. It's more inspiring to me.

Then, I layed out the scraps on my design board until I liked the composition.

When I landed on an arrangement that I liked, I sewed them together. This formed the background for the quilt piece.

After the background was sewn and pressed, I started to layer other elements on top. In my collages, I use small pieced scraps, raw edge fabric scraps, as well as things like yarn, string, buttons, or any 3-D do-dads I can find laying around my studio.

Then, I carefully carried the collage to my sewing machine and free motion quilted over the whole piece. When the quilt sandwich was assembled, I had to decide whether to  bind it to make a wall piece, or turn it into something else like a bag.

I kind of wish I had left it as an art piece, but I wanted to practice creating the elements for a bag. Here's the finished product. What do you think?

It's like Christmas

Today I rinsed out my fabric. Boy, that takes a while. I rinse and rinse and then I wash it in the washing machine. It's so much fun to see how each piece comes out. I'm not an exact or precise dyer. I love the spontaneity of mixing colors and keeping my fingers crossed. This time was even more of a gamble because I used up some dye that I had sitting around for months (maybe a year, if the truth be told). I wasn't sure if it would still be good. The colors are perhaps not as vibrant as they could be, but for my purposes they will do just fine.




Ah, Christmas in August. Always a fun surprise to see. It's important to have a helper too!
Stay tuned to see my new project. I might ask for help in deciding what to call it...

"hand" dyed fabric

I did some fabric dying this morning and I didn't realize that I had a hole in my glove.

When I finished, I found that my hand was "hand-dyed" as well. So, I scrubbed it with 3 different kinds of soap and even washed a bunch of dishes, but this is what it still looked like...

Then I decided to try my non-toxic fabric brightener, called Nature Bright. I rubbed the powder on my hand, then soaked my hand for about 5 minutes. Voila! Not perfect, but good enough to go out in public now!

The Process

Here's how I usally start out. I grab some chunks of fabric, in this case, from my hand dyed stash, and randomly piece them together.

Then I start layering on various design elements for a fabric collage. Here I actually used a panel that I used to have on a t-shirt. I cut it off the t-shirt and layed it on the quilt. Then I added some other hand-painted pieces, some fuzzy yarn, some thread scraps and beads. I machine quilted it and used a zig-zag finish to the edges. Voila!