A cool bag for my cool bro

I like sewing.  I really like sewing bags.  I really, really like sewing things for my peeps.  Sewing for my mom, kind of easy.  Sewing for my dad, impossible.  Sewing for my sister, really easy.  Sewing for my brother, near impossible...UNTIL...I came up with an idea.  You see, I had bought him a cool, old-school travel agency bag from a Salvation Army type store.  Only, the bag was old and within a year the vinyl lining was peeling away, rendering the bag see-through and not structurally sound.  I finally had something I could make him - a replacement!  Next problem: my brother is VERY minimalist.  He's not into fun fabrics (well, in all fairness most men aren't) or crazy appliquéd detailing.  My solution was to make him a bag modeled along the lines of his old one out of natural cotton with some simple black thread embroidery.

This is the pencil drawing I made before I started the embroidery.  The design is a tracing I made of a plant shadow.  Organic, yet simple.

This is the front of the bag.  

I don't know what they treated the fabric with, and I probably don't want to know, because whenever I ironed it, the steam smelled like urine.  I warned my brother that he should try not to get it wet, or it'll stink!

This is the back, with a pocket.

This shows the side.  

I had a couple issues sewing this bag.  The one problem were the corners.  They are okay, but I wasn't 100% happy with the way they turned out.  The other problem was sewing through so many layers of thick cotton to attach the straps on the side.  My sewing machine was not very happy.  I eventually reinforced it with a bit of hand sewing.  

The zipper is one that I recycled from an old backpack.  Same with the plastic D-rings.  I'm all about recycling stuff.  

Lady Marmalade

I'm a big fan of going out for breakfast.  Most of the time I order a simple two egg breakfast, since I'm a simple pleasures kind of gal.  Going out for breakfast is a great way to catch up with friends before the day gets busy and its especially great because it is so inexpensive.  I recently moved to Victoria, BC and have slowly been checking out the various breakfast places in town.  A couple weekends ago I went to Lady Marmalade with a friend.

I had heard mixed things about L.M. - good food, poor service and I decided to check it out myself.  In Victoria going out for breakfast can mean long lineups, which really sucks when you're hungry.  My friend and I are morning folk, and we arrived early enough (8:45 AM) that we had lots of choice for seating.  This is what it looks like inside - a bit eclectic, but in a homey (homy?) way.

I ordered (of course) the two eggs breakfast and my friend ordered the huevos rancheros.  I had been excited to see breakfast poutine, but then had those hopes dashed when the server told me no poutine on weekends. Here is my breakfast:

The presentation is super.  Overall I'd say that the ingredients were great: real butter, crunchy bread, real eggs (look at that yellow), good temperature, and decent portions.  The potatoes were a bit grrrrr, by which I mean tough.  The salad was a nice touch but the pieces could have been a bit smaller and therefore easier to manage.  Here is my friends breakfast:

He was a bit more disappointed.  His comments included the following: the beans tasted like they'd just been dumped out of a can with no flavouring added, the tortillas were sitting in the salsa and getting soggy, and overall it just wasn't easy to eat, unlike other huevos rancheros he'd had in the past.  Again though, great ingredients.

We both agreed that while L.M. was decent, neither of us would make it a favourite for breakfasts.

Fun Fish Patched Jeans

I’m always happy to find projects that allow me to use my sewing and creative skills in new ways.  Some time ago, I noticed a friend’s jeans – they were old, softened and well worn.  He’d already put a couple of patches on them with his sewing machine (I know – a man who owns a sewing machine, awesome!).  I offered to make him a patch to cover a slit in the knee.  This picture shows the patch I made (the fish) and his patch (the red square).

Up close you could that the pants still needed a lot of love.  Really, they were so worn that a lot of the fabric needed to be shored up.  Thus began a minor labour of love.  I quickly realized that I wouldn’t be able to access many of the areas with the legs intact, so I split the jeans down each outside seam.

I wanted to somehow blend my fish patch and his red square patch, since red squares and fish don’t usually coexist!  You can see in the next photo how I did a mock up of what I wanted to do.  I went online to find different types of fish to use.  At least one was inspired by a photo from National Geographic.

To make the patches I used an unbleached cotton as a base and sewed coloured fabrics onto it with a zig zag stitch.  For a couple I also did some hand embroidery.  Here’s the beginnings of the flying fish patch.  You can see the pencil outlines of the other patches.

Here is one of the fish where I did some hand embroidery for the eyes and the gills.

I made up some squares in red to match the original red square.  Here I’ve tacked them onto the jeans before I sew them on using my machine.

Here is the finished look of the front of the pants.  Under some of the areas I also sewed in a reinforcing layer of jean harvested from another soft old pair of jeans he gave me.  I didn’t want to go to all this work only to have the thighs rip open.

Having done all that work I decided that the back needed some attention even though the fabric wasn’t very worn out there.  I was at a loss about what to do fish-wise when I came up with the idea of a school of fish crossing across both legs.  Here is what it looked like before I sewed down my school.  You can see the split side seams.

This is a close up of the little fish.  I used some leftover slinky silver fabric and sewed it on with rainbow metallic thread.  [Side note: I think I was a bird in my past life and I love sparkles, so my sister bought me this spool of metallic thread even though I wasn’t sure what I’d ever use it for.]

Here is the back once it was completed. 

My friend has worn these jeans.  It takes a strong man to wear jeans covered in fish patches, but he’s got the personality to pull it off.  Unfortunately he’s a bit concerned to wear the pants in case they get damaged.  I guess he’ll just have to treat them like the work of art they are.

Hexagonal Bedside Table Quilt

I’ve wanted to make a quilt with hexagons for some time.  I did a trial run with seven hexagons made out of scraps a few years ago to see how the seams would work, and it surprisingly didn’t look like a big jumbled mess.  Since then the idea has been rattling around in my noggin’.  I finally decided that I would made a quilt for my bedside table with the hexagons.  In addition to the hexagons I also wanted to try sewing it such that I didn’t use bias tape or any other type of edging.

I measured my bedside table and roughly sketched the design I wanted.  Then I figured out the size of hexagons I would need to make up the final correct size.  In Powerpoint I used the hexagon tool to make a hexagon of the correct size which I printed out for my template. 

I went through my Rubbermaid bins of fabric to find a bunch of fabric I thought went well together.  As with a lot of what I do, I didn’t have a set idea, but I went with what felt right.  When we were younger my dad wore dress shirts every day to work.  There was a factory in a small town on our way to visiting relatives that we would stop in at so my father could buy dress shirts.  Recently they stopped making shirts at the site, but my parents picked me up a big box of shirting cotton.  What lovely stuff – fine grain, smooth and so many beautiful stripes, plaids and solids.  I used some of these fabrics with the addition of a nice floral.  I cut out a bunch of hexagons and then moved them around until I found an arrangement I liked.

The key to sewing up the hexagons is to mark on the back of the fabric points between which you will sew.  I used a ¼” seam allowance, so I would mark that out and then I knew I had to sew between where the two seams were marked.

The next step was to iron it so that all the seams lay in the same direction.  I didn’t want it bunching up, or if it were going to bunch up, I wanted it all doing it the same way.  I ironed it so that all the seams faced one way and then I quickly hemmed them all down.  That way they wouldn’t move when I started sewing through them.  I have some neon pink and yellow thread that I use for my hemming.  It is too poor quality to use on my machine as it snaps, but its great for hemming since its so visible.  The only problem with it is if little bits get sewn in I end up with dots of neon here and there.

The next step was to hem the top to the batting and the backing.

Of course I had to quilt it.  I didn’t do all the seams, but most of them.  I think its called in the ditch (where you sew right between the two pieces in the seam).  I made sure not to sew right up to the edge, but ¼” back.

Now remember how I said I wanted to avoid bias tape?  Well, here is where the really fussy work began.  I traced all around the edge of the top. 

Then I cut along that edge.  Pushing back the top I marked my ¼” seam allowance on the batting. 

Next step was to cut that ¼” of batting away, and start hemming the backing up around the batting.

Then I folded the top ¼” under and hemmed it to the bottom.

After all that hemming it was simple to sew around the edge.  I also went back and hand quilted the last little edges between where I had machine quilted and the actual edge.

Here is the final look.

I’m pretty happy with it.  Fussy, but it was worth it, and it now graces my bedside table.