An August Fields bag

I received this new fabric in the mail yesterday from Cynthia at Fabricworm. She has a great shop on Etsy, with lots of wonderful fabrics from a wide variety of designers. Best part again… super fast shipping! I didn’t think it would be possible to receive it so quickly!

This is new fabric from Amy Butler – part of the August Fields line which came out at the end of July. It’s a home dec weight – 100% cotton canvas – and has a great feel. There are also lots of fun prints in this line, so it’s hard to choose which to purchase!

I bought this one to use for another bag. I assumed that I would have some fabric here which would work for the liner, but as it turns out, these colors, especially the turquoise, are really hard to match with anything I already own. I ended up at the fabric store last night with Morgan, trying to match it with anything they carried. Morgan, to his credit, was quite helpful, and kept suggesting solids in either yellow or some shade of brown. I finally took his advice and went with a medium brown twill.

Turns out it looked better in the store. After I sewed it and put the bag together, he took one look at it and remarked that the liner looked like pantyhose. Quite true, actually. That brown is the standard nylon-y color and it even has a bit of that sheen to it. Ugh, awful.

Luckily I haven’t yet sewn the liner to the bag, so there’s still time to make this right. Although I’m back to square one – still no matching liner fabric! In the photo above you’ll see my current two possibilities – either the pink polka dots or the orange houndstooth. I may just flip a coin, though I’m leaning towards the orange. I’ve been reading Jessica Jones’ blog – How about Orange – she says that orange is the best color, and lately I tend to agree. I guess if I do use the orange, I’ll be able to post a picture to her Flickr pool… that’s something, right?

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too many posts about napkins?

I wordled (is that even a word?!) my blog this weekend – curious to see what words I used most often. You may have seen this already, but if not, this will create a word cloud based on text you provide – either from a bunch of text pasted into the site, or from a web page you provide. The words vary in size based on how often they’re found in the text you provide.

I used my blog, and this is what I ended up with

It seems to sum it up – the largest words in my cloud seem to be saying “(yet) Another fabric napkin project” I imagine it with the ‘yet’ added and perhaps a question mark at the end, and quite possibly a sigh from the person saying it. I guess I should ease up on the posts about napkins!

In any case, you can create your own wordle here – www.wordle.net. It’s kind of fun, and you can change all sorts of things, including the font, word direction, colors, etc.


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Echino Panther Dotty bag

I promised not to gush over my own projects, but once again, I really can’t help it. I really am in love with this bag! I made it out of a great linen/cotton blend fabric by a great Japanese designer Etsuko Furuya. It’s a great spa blue background with pink polka dots and panthers – how great is that?!

As per usual, I only had half a yard of this fabric. I guess it’s my own fault for not being able to commit to a larger amount (or maybe I’m just cheap?!)… In any case, it did limit the size bag I was able to make. The other limiting factor was that I wanted the same placement of the panthers on each side of the bag. I ended up using almost every scrap of this fabric, and while I did have to do a bit of piecing on the straps, it actually worked out almost perfectly.

I used Amy Butler Full Moon Polka Dot in Slate for the lining of the bag and the reverse side of the straps, as well as an interior pocket (trimmed with a bit of the pink polka dots from the front). As with my last bag, I used two layers of a thick fusible interfacing. It gave it enough stability so that it will stand on its own.

(a panther in the grass!)

I almost don’t want to use it, for fear of something happening to it – you never know, there could be an unexpected rain shower, I could spill my coffee all over it, the possible unpleasant scenarios are endless! Instead, I carry it from room to room so I can look at it (does anyone else do that with the things they make, or am I just crazy!)

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