Swaps

I finished up two swaps this weekend! Most people wait until their swaps have arrived before blogging about them, but since none of my three readers know my swap partners, I think I'm safe.

The first is for a set of nine patches:



The yellow and blue patches are 12.5" raw to raw and the shades of blue patches are 10.5" raw to raw. WAT?? Yeah seriously, the girl requested 10.5" squares. She said that she didn't really understand seam allowances, but that all of her other squares were that size. That works out to squares cut 3 5/6", so I ended up cutting them 4" and then just sewing them together repeatedly with different seam allowances until it turned out right. (Mostly) It was quite a pain.

I also made a reusable grocery/tote bag. I started this swap a little early, and made this bag from some remnant fabric that I found at Joann's. Two dollars for it! I think it's meant for upholstering outdoor furniture.



It ended up being more of a beach tote shape than a traditional grocery bag shape because the fabric remnant was only 18" x 60", so my options were limited. Because of the cut shape, I made the bag with a seam on bottom and up one side instead of a seamless bottom and seams on both sides. As usual, my "wing it" attitude made the bag more difficult than it had to be (attaching the straps was un-fun), but I got through it.
Unfortunately, by the time I had finished the bag, I was sort of in love. I mean... look at how the pocket stripes head the other direction! It's just a grocery bag, but I couldn't give it away. Luckily, once my partner was assigned, I saw that her preference is for lavender and teal, so I had an excuse to make her a new bag and keep that one. I made it out of some denim fabric that I had stashed and accented it with some leftover costume fabric. This was the result:



Hopefully my partner likes the denim bag... it's not much to my taste so I don't mind sending it off. :P

4th finish and whoa progress!

I sewed up this little number a few weekends ago and just now got around to taking pictures:



I started by randomly cutting into a pair of old jeans, which probably wasn't the most efficient thing, since I later wished that I had left on some of those fabric bits that I had cut off initially, but it was great for the creative process because I ended up having to piece bits back together to get the size of bag that I wanted. It's just right for carrying around my embroidery... except that now I only have one little one left to finish. You can sort of see the little Winnie-the-Pooh fabric that I used to line the bag... that was a steal from Walmart. It's not a very durable-looking fabric, but it's nice and soft. :)

This weekend I worked on my big quilt, and oh-em-gee it's going faster than I expected. I finished all of the pieced blocks for the center of the top and got a good start on the pieced border. Here's what it looks like so far:





I am so, so pleased!