Friday, May 24, 2013

ByAnnie Sew-a-long Day 3

Choosing Fabric

Don't you just love it when a Quilting or Bag pattern says... "This pattern can be made from the following fabrics"... blah blah blah. 


I want to be successful with the pattern the first time I make it so I like to choose a fabric as close to the demo as possible. This particular pattern tells us what the cover bag was made from so, I immediately went looking at my batiks. byAnnie's bag looks perfect and I want mine to be perfect as well.

from the back of the byAnnie pattern

I did read in the instructions that it would be a good idea to stabilize the fabric with a lightweight iron on interfacing if you weren't using decorator fabric, but while I was reading the pattern, I realized that not all the fabric needed to be stabilized.
This lightweight iron on interfacing seems to be readily available.
I like to buy metres of it at my local fabric shop and keep it on hand.

 Good thing I read through, because otherwise I would have put the stabilizer on before I cut everything. Maybe this reading thing is a good thing after all. I will have to try it more often.

Make sure you have everything you need.

OK. this is where I always get in trouble. I start something and get half way through it and find out I don't have a long enough zipper or that little piece of vinyl or interfacing or....

I actually ended up using a quilting cotton
which I interfaced. It seems to be working out perfectly.


This time I took the time and gathered everything. I even had some hardware that looked like it might work. (I found out later it was too big, so I have ordered it from byAnnie... it has all the parts I need. because I live in Canada and it needs to come over the border it probably will take a few days longer but I know in the past the orders have been sent out within 24 hours.

1/2" antique brass hardware set

I like to keep everything together In the past I have used little boxes from the dollar store , but this year I found a handy little pattern for a bag at Becky's blog...Patchwork Posse... that I now call My project bag. For this project I used 2 nine inch squares.  I like to bind them because I take them everywhere with me and I like the finished look. And they are reusable, if you don't have all of them full of other projects that haven't quite made it to the finished pile yet!


After I had my fabric etc, picked out and stored happily in its new home I cut out all the pieces, following the layout in the pattern.  I have a little cutting tutorial I will have ready for Monday so see you then for day 4 of our SAL.

Note: Still not an employee of byAnnie or Amazon nor did they ask me to say anything at all, never mind nice!

Here is another Nickel Bucket Tote.
I made these for my sewing buddies one year for their birthdays.
One afternoon and you can get one of these babies done!
 I have my pattern if any one wants it.

3 comments:

AimeeDP said...

Hey, you're a genius, that's our challenge fabric, i'll make mine from the same gorgeous orange, that was such a beautiful line of fabrice, I have one of them just spread out on my sewing table so I can adore it! It's this one..wild garden by dan rowan, i LOOVE the one on the lower left!
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSLcJ8XV5z9_k302ynL1DUlNgTn4nWeKlCDN83BhL1zEyyj74APtg

Unknown said...

....or rather Wild Garden by Dan Bennet FOR Rowan Fabrics

Unknown said...

I think Dan Rowan was a comedian... just saying' LOL