Pink Poke-A-Dot Bag

I have been working on making a couple of new bag/purses the last week or so since I finished making Sweet Remembrance.  I started out with the Belle pattern by my friend Geta Grama from Romanian Quilt Studio.  I made the Amelie bag last March and you can see it here on this post.  They are both great patterns.   I chose a pink poke-a-dot and green morie upholstery fabrics, plus the green and pink trim.  I machine quilted the poke-a-dot fabric in a feather design and the green fabric in a diamond cross hatch.


This time I wanted a smaller purse so reduced the Belle bag by 75% for starters.  I did take more out of the width of the pattern too….in hind sight this was not a good idea.  I don’t mean the shrinking the pattern but the extra 2” I took out of the width.   OK, here is the bag as it was originally made.

The outside front has two pockets – love the curved look.  This came straight from the pattern but I did change the backside by adding another pocket to hold my cell phone.  I used the trim on either side of that pocket.  There is a zippered pocket at the top that came straight from the pattern. 

Pink Poke-A-Dot Bag VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

Now take a look at the finished purse/bag.  See how narrow it looks at the top?  Way, way too narrow so guess what I did?  I took the entire thing apart and remade it to more my liking.

First I quilted the strip then trimmed it down to 2” and I quilted strips for the lining too.  I then cut the front and back purse/bag sections down 3” shorter than I originally had cut it.  I also straightened the sides of of the purse (it was tapered before)  then added the strips to the straightened sides.  This made the whole purse a little wider.  You can see the zippered pocket in the lining on one side and the pocket on the other side.  I stitched Velcro onto the strap and the pocket as I just hate it when my precious stuff falls out of my purse!

Enlarging the Bag VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

I really like the way the bag turned out as the proportions are better now.  If I wouldn’t have taken that extra 1in. pleat out of the original 75%  pattern I probably would not have had to do the remodel job on it in the first place.   Another thing I did was stitch the top trim down to 3/4”.  I really like this shoulder bag a lot now. 

Finished Remodeled Bag VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

Happy Quilting,
Lynn

Sweet Remembrance

Sweet Remembrance 14 1/4” x 14 3/4”

Sweet Remembrance - the name I finally chose for this miniature.  As I promised here is a photo of the quilt all finished and with a name.  I had a long list of names I thought of or pieces and parts of the suggestions I got from you for names but nothing was quite right.  I really liked the word Cameo but couldn’t quite get it to roll off my tongue with the combinations I had come up with. 

The flowers in this piece are supposed to be Primroses and Periwinkles and when looking up flower names and what they mean the name for my quilt jumped out at me.  The meaning of the periwinkle flower on the web page I found said it meant “sweet remembrance”.  It hit me as the perfect name for this quilt.  Doesn’t that sound pretty? 

I don’t always agonize over the naming of my quilts but do like to choose a name with meaning.  Almost like naming a child or naming a pet…it just has to sound right and fit.  I usually think of the name for a quilt as I am making it so when it is finished I have the name ready but not this time.  Maybe it was because it took so long  to get it done.  I started this quilt way back in the spring of 2009 when I was also making 2 others with the same center basket - to see all three flower baskets click on April 4, 2009.  The other two quilts were finished that spring and given away to be auctioned off for the Nebraska Cattlemen's Ball (raise money to fight cancer) and the Nebraska State Quilt Guild.

I do love the way this quilt turned out but of course there are always things I want to change….want to put that dark purple fabric on the outer edge to pull the dark color to the outside, be a little more precise on the mitered corners, etc.  Think that there are always things I could improve on with every quilt but this one is done and I will work on the next one to make it better I guess.

Now off to start a new project on this damp misty morning.

Lynn

Note:  The photos are much clearer and sharper when you click on them....don't know why they show up as fuzzy in the blog.

Sitting in the Sunshine

Farm Cats VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

Living on a farm, we have cats that live in the barn, shop and other out buildings.  We feed them cat food but they are good at catching mice that would take over if they weren’t there.  It is fun to watch them play on a nice day and the one black and white cat that is only a year old was having fun climbing up and down off of the large round bale recently on a nice sunny day.  Walter, the granddaughters named him, settled down after a while to watch the farmstead from his high perch.  Mr. Cat, the yellow and white one and Darkness the black one were enjoying the sunshine streaming in the large door of the shop.  I whistled and they both looked at me at the same time….lucky, as cats pretty much do what they want, when they want. 

Mr. Cat is a really old cat for being an outside cat.  We think he may be approaching 15.  He was here when John’s parents lived here and they had him neutered so sadly we have no offspring from him.  A lot of times neutered cats are just lazy but that is not the case with Mr. Cat.  We see him hunting and with mice or birds all the time.  When my in-laws lived here they called him Old Yeller but John couldn’t ever remember his name and when we were remodeling the house before we moved in we brought our daughter and granddaughters over to see what we had done so far.  As we drove into the yard he walked across in front of us and the granddaughters immediately asked John what his name was.  Without a pause John just said…. “ahhh…Mr. Cat” and Mr. Cat he has been since then. 

Darkness got her name from a movie.  We had two orphan kittens John was raising in the shop so he named them Ghost and Darkness after the lions in the movie “The Ghost and The Darkness”.  (Scary movie by the way.)  Ghost disappeared after a year but Darkness has been a shop cat for several years now.  She is also neutered as she just didn’t know how to be a mother.  She had about 4 litters of kittens and didn’t take care of them from the time they were born….just wandered off and they died right away.  We didn’t want her to keep having kittens so had her fixed.  Sometimes kittens that are hand raised just don’t learn some of the instincts they should have so mother love is important in the cat world too.

We got Walter’s mother, Olivia named by the granddaughters,  from a gal in town and the kittens we brought home with us all died but Olivia stayed….think the kittens were all sick when we brought them home and very wild so we couldn’t catch them, were supposed to be tame .   Last spring she had another batch of kittens and they sure are pretty and are pretty tame.   The granddaughters were here soon after so again they named them all for us.  John and I kept forgetting what they named some of them so at Christmas “D” made us a cheat sheet using a pink marker and even drew cat faces to show the markings.  She couldn’t see why we could forget their names.  I have kept that near the kitchen window and now think I remember them.  Love her spelling!  Walter is really tame and the others are in degrees tame.  They all know John as he is the one that feeds them….actually he looks like the Pied Piper in the morning as they are close to the house and follow him to the barn as fast as they can go.

Lynn

Sitting on Red Comfort

I broke down and got a new chair for my sewing machine.  I had been using an office chair that just didn’t fit me and got really uncomfortable after sitting at the machine for a while.  I had stopped in at the Bernina store to check about a new foot I wanted to get and sat in the beige Horn chair while the clerk finished helping someone else.  Wow, how comfy.  The clerk helped me with the foot then said the red Bernina chair was the same as the beige one only made with red fabric and had the Bernina logo on the back.  She told me they had ordered several of the red ones in before Christmas and wanted to sell them out so offered me a great deal that I just couldn’t resist.


Oh -  by the way, I just finished cleaning my sewing room up as we are having company this weekend so it was the ideal time to take a photo.  Doesn’t it look nice?  I couldn’t believe how many piles of fabric, paper, etc. there was  piled on every flat surface plus all the fabric snips and threads on the floor.


The chair was all boxed up so John had to put it together when I got it home.  It didn’t take him too long before it was ready to sit in.

		New Bernina Sewing Chair VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

One thing I really like, besides the comfortable padding on the chair is the different ways you can adjust it to fit.  There is a knob on the back side to raise and lower the back rest.  On the right side are three levers for my adjustments.  I can raise and lower the height of the chair, tip the seat forward or backward and another lever to tip the backrest back to fit too.  I actually turned the photo up side down so you could read the levers and see the cute diagrams on them.

Back to cleaning….my house will look so good when I am finished but hope no one opens one of my closets that desperately need cleaned and sorted!

Lynn