Glady & Cloudy Craft Blog

I have finally finished a few knot bags that I am going to put up on Etsy for sale soon.

This one is actually the last item of the color challenge I took part in the last few weeks, this is my pink item…

And this one is my favourite color combination - yellow background with red cherries (I love fabric with cherries) combined with navy blue checkers - very ‘kitchen’ look.

Here are all of them laying flat before tying up the knots.

And here they are after tying up all the knots.

I am quite happy with the results, although the amount of hand sewing time is much more than what I have expected. Now, move on to the next project…

I have joined up at Swap-bot earlier this month, and so far I have sent out 2 swaps.

This is for the first swap, which is called Fat 1/4 Material Fantasy Swap red,white and blue

And this is for the second swap, which is called FS Boon Bag Swap #8 – Summer Fun!!

The content of these swaps are main fabric and other sewing and crafting materials, I will not review these ones yet as I’m not sure if my swap partners has received them already or not (so to keep the surprise). I will post the content pics at a later stage.

I am having fun with the swaps so far, I haven’t received my swaps yet, hopefully I will get them in the next few days.

The next swap I’m going to work on is a newbie ATC (artist trading card) swap, I have never made an ATC before but this should be good fun

Last weekend our local quilting society held a Quilters’ Market Day, from where you could find around 20 little stalls in one church hall, and they sold a lot of fabrics (mostly fat quarters), magazines, books, patterns, notions, etc, basically a trash and treasure for quilting and patchwork and fabric lovers.

I had a lot of fun search through a lot of fabrics, some in a more dated style and some newer ones, I bought a few things, and the most exciting treasure for me (aside from 27 magazines), was a few stacks of off-cut bits and pieces from a relatively new fabric series called City Girl by Kitty Yoshida that came out in 2008. The lady who sold them told me that she bought the fabric from the big Houston Quilt Show a few months ago, she made a quilt with them and these are the off-cuts. Apparently this series is not available in Australia yet.

I really love this type of more contemporary design fabrics. The other stack of yummy scraps is also from the same lady, it’s a stack of Amy Butler fabrics off-cuts.

Although Amy Butler’s fabrics are available in Australia, and I dearly love them, I haven’t buy too many of them because of $$ and well, looking at my existing stash… So I’m happy to own a little piece of everything

I haven’t decided what to do with them yet, but I’m happy enough just staring at them at the moment. One day when I turn these yummy fabrics into a project, I will certainly put it up here.

I didn’t get my act together to do the red challenge last week, so, I’ve decided to combine my red and green challenge this week.

I wanted to try out a very simple bag pattern I saw in a Japanese craft book, so here is the result.

I copied the pattern from the craft book during the week last week, but then I managed to left the book at work before the weekend started, so I could not follow the instructions step-by-step while I was putting it together last night (I cannot read Japanese but the diagrams are relatively easy to follow). So with a bit of try and error and unpicking, I managed to put it together and I’m quite happy with the result, and it doesn’t take long to make… well, aside from the unpicking bit… I particularly like the knot closure, very cute.

The pattern is for a bag probably for a lunch box, but I think I am going to try to make a bigger version of it, as I think this can be quite handing as a foldup shopping bag.

I finally finished my Brown Challenge item, it’s a bit late as I believe everyone has ventured onto red already… anyway, it doesn’t matter as I’m happy that this is finally done.

This is a challenge for me in a few aspects - I always want to try making a traveller bag, and I finally did it! The other thing is, I bought this second hand overlocker a few months ago and apart from testing, I have never actually used it, so here is a project that I can put my overlocker in good use.

However, I am not entirely happy with the result, the tension… or something is not quite right and I was too impatient to get it completely correct… therefore I don’t think this is something good enough for sale…

I am happy with the result of the inside pockets though, I made this zipper pocket following this tutorial, and it is very effective. I have also added patched pockets on the other side of the lining, and one with magnetic snap closure on the outside as well.

All in all this is not the perfect bag, but I am happy that it is done and it ‘looks alright’, and I have learnt a lot of things that I should and shouldn’t do next time with a duffle bag. The fabric is from the Sentimental Journey series of Robyn Pandolph.