Brown Bag

When confronting the fact that my fabric stash was straining the spaces designated to store it (spaces which are intentionally much smaller than they used to be), I had fun a month or so ago shuffling through the dresser (home of roughly quarter yard cuts, mostly bought for doll clothes) and matching various prints by coordinating color schemes, which I then put in a pile with no solid ideas of what to make from the new sets of fabrics.

(Was that sentence convoluted enough?)

Saturday morning, I decided to challenge myself to using one of the smaller sets, which I knew wouldn't make anything big enough to turn into a skirt or blanket.  With no real goal in mind, I started patching it together, in a very loose approximation of a Log Cabin pattern, only with random colors and widths.  Sure, why not.

I didn't measure anything at any point in this project, so I have no idea how large it was before I ran out of strips long enough to sew to the next edge.  It looked like it might be big enough to cut a vest front from, though, maybe...?  But...as there was an abundance of browns and oranges in the prints, I knew I'd never wear a vest made from it.  And when it come to the question of Randomly Making Random Things for Random Other People, the answer is always Bag!

It would be too large to make a comfortable bag if I used the pieced, um, piece for just the front, so I played around with folding it in half for a while before I had the idea to fold the corners on the diagonal, which was the key to figuring out, finally, exactly (well, more or less exactly) what I wanted to do with this project...

The unifying idea for this print assortment was not only the color scheme, but also a bit of a mid-1970s vibe...plus pink.

I started with the last largest piece I had of the scattered birds print, and used every other print at least twice.  I did use a right triangle to sort of get the corners to be 90°, but didn't even think about using a straight edge when cutting the corners off.  I'm very much not a serious patchworker, nope.  I fused the last large piece of medium weight interfacing I had to the back side of the resulting piece.

The cut-off corners were not all the same size, so I had to add a strip to the edges of two of them to get things to line up.  And, if it was possible to assemble them back into a square without having the same print end up next to itself in one area, well, my brain couldn't figure that out.  But I don't think it was a problem.

There's interfacing on the back of this piece, too, although it's a whole bunch of little pieces jigsawed together.  I do that sometimes...  I like how things just happened to line up in a few places, obscuring the fact that this panel is made up of big patchwork triangles (with their long edges making up the sides of the bag.)

I then assessed the pieces of cloth that were left unpatchworked and figured out which pieces were the right size for the handles (which are interfaced with the cloth used for the lining) and which pieces were the right size to make up the sides and bottom.

This left a few pieces left that inspired me to make the lining more decorative than I'd originally expected (you almost get the idea I don't do a lot of planning in some of my projects, don't you?)

The brown gingham feels like it has polyester in it, so it should be a decent lining.

There's not a lot of any of these fabrics left.

I spent a solid six hours on this Saturday, with a bit more work Saturday night, and finishing it Sunday morning.  I have no idea what I'll do with it--probably'll end up as someone's present, someday...

So, hey, a tiny bit of my stash has been busted!