One pointy stick
For the past two nights, I have been abandoning my wooden needles in favor of a single needle of the small, eyed, sharp, and metal persuasion. You see, lots of craft-bog reading, a Japanese craft book, and a small fabric binge later, I finally joined the Sew? I Knit!-along. I had been eyeing the sew-along all month but the project for March, skirts, was beyond me, both skill-wise and in terms of sewing-machine literacy. Fortunately, the project of the sew-along for April is bags! Just when I’d been dreaming about one day making the ones in my new book, along comes the perfect opportunity for me to frog-leap those projects to the head of my to-do queue.
Here is one of the bags that I want to make (though I am still debating between that and this one).
Do those spots look familiar? Here is yesterday’s mystery picture eight spots later and zoomed out.
This is actually just a very simple round-bottom bag and not the purse in the book. I wasn’t sure how the linen I have would hold up in terms of fraying at the raw edge of the hole so I decided to do a test version. Since I was getting sick of carrying my knitting around in plastic bags made holey and ragged by knitting needles, making a test version in the form of a draw-string bag was a perfectly practical solution (and is conveniently my red project for this month). So, some ironing and stitching of the spotted rectangle later, et voila!
I still need stitch up the top of the bag but that has to wait until I can go by the fabric store to pick up some cord. For the most part, though, the bag is finished and I have learned two things. One, leaving the raw edges at the circles certainly won’t work since the linen frays as soon as you look at it. Two, while I really like the spots close-up, especially those where the calico fabric shows through,
I’m not sure if I like the effect of the entire bag. Perhaps fewer spots? Spots of the same size? Some circles not cut out but just outlined on the background fabric? Or does the whole dark spots on light fabric not work at all? What do you think?
Here is one of the bags that I want to make (though I am still debating between that and this one).
Do those spots look familiar? Here is yesterday’s mystery picture eight spots later and zoomed out.
This is actually just a very simple round-bottom bag and not the purse in the book. I wasn’t sure how the linen I have would hold up in terms of fraying at the raw edge of the hole so I decided to do a test version. Since I was getting sick of carrying my knitting around in plastic bags made holey and ragged by knitting needles, making a test version in the form of a draw-string bag was a perfectly practical solution (and is conveniently my red project for this month). So, some ironing and stitching of the spotted rectangle later, et voila!
I still need stitch up the top of the bag but that has to wait until I can go by the fabric store to pick up some cord. For the most part, though, the bag is finished and I have learned two things. One, leaving the raw edges at the circles certainly won’t work since the linen frays as soon as you look at it. Two, while I really like the spots close-up, especially those where the calico fabric shows through,
I’m not sure if I like the effect of the entire bag. Perhaps fewer spots? Spots of the same size? Some circles not cut out but just outlined on the background fabric? Or does the whole dark spots on light fabric not work at all? What do you think?
posted by Marie at 3:15 AM
7 Comments:
I like it ... it's very spring-like. I think the linen and calico combination works well, and am in awe of your very even stitching around the circles.
I really like your bag - the cut outs came out so pretty and the stitching is so neat!
I love your Klaralund! I'm tickled that we're Klaralund twins (triplets if we count yai-Ann too!)!
I love the dark spots on the light background, and I really like the different sizes too. It looks naive in a really good way.
Fewer spots might be a good idea: it looks lovely at the moment but if you spread it over a larger area lots of red spots on white might run the risk of looking like your bag has measles.. ;) Maybe you could have almost evenly-spaced spots of differnt sizes? That would make it look more purposeful, and calmer.
I really like it as it is though, but if you're worried that's my tuppence-worth.
Lovely bag! To help with the fraying, you could get fray check or block and put it on the edge...try it on your test bag first and see if you like it..HTH :)
That's a really cool bag, I really like the dots. I need to get cozy with my sewing machine soon and make myself a knitting bag, and I think some needle rolls, too.
Very cool idea - and the see-through cutouts make the bag very interesting!
Zelia, I cut the circles out, then stitched. It would have been a lot harder, I think, to do it the other way around. :)
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