Velocity Girl Bag

At the beginning of this year, Sara from Sew Sweetness put a call out for pattern testers and I jumped at the chance! Along with garments, she also designs bags, which I have been wanting to try for a while. I was kinda bummed that with grad school and work, my schedule didn't allow me to test her first three patterns, but thankfully I had enough time to try out her latest pattern, the Velocity Girl bag. Can you believe that she has already released four patterns since the start of the year?!

This bag was so much fun to make, especially since I was able to use fabric from my stash! The exterior fabric is leftover from the dress that I made for our Black History Month luncheon last year at work. Who knows why I had two yards of the blue cotton that I used as a lining, but it worked out perfecly. I LOVE the African print so I'm glad that I'll be able to carry it around more often than I wear the dress (which I still declare a dud, but wore last week anyway).

Being the procrastinator that I am, I took until the last day that our comments were due to finish my bag. Of course I wasn't able to finish before the sun went down, so I was stuck taking photos indoors. Thankfully the lighting isn't too terrible thanks to our new recessed lighting!

The slim side pockets will be perfect for holding pens, which seem to always swim around in my purses. The exterior has three pockets and there are three more on the inside, as well as a zippered pocket.

I had so many sewing firsts with the purse! This was definitely the thickest project that I've sewn, due to the stabilizer between the layers. I love how nicely the purse stands up because of it (Sara uses By Annie's Soft and Stable). This is the first time I've ever really worked with hardware, such as the magnetic closure or the strap accessories. I was pleasantly surprised to see that inserting the zipper was essentially the same as inserting the zipper on the collar of the Minoru!

I'm so pleased with the end result that I keep staring at it like it's one of my first sewing projects. Check out Sara's pattern shop for this pattern and the others! I'm excited to see what she comes up with next!

Maximon Embroidery

I finished another embroidery for our embroidery wall! This one is of Maximon, a Mayan folk saint of the people of Guatemala.

Before our trip, we were told that upon arriving in Santiago, a small child would approach us and ask us if we would like to be taken to see Maximon. Our response should be yes! The Maximon figure is passed between houses throughout the year and the local custom is that tourists pay the children to take them to see him, where you give a small offering in exchange for a picture. 

I kept the embroidery pretty simple because I thought it would just get muddied if I included the textures of the scarves.

I think it captures the essence of Maximon without getting distracting. We only need a few more finished before we can start hanging them up!

Mixtape Quilt Top

Greetings, anyone who still has this blog in their reader! I finished the quilt top for the first quilt that I'm keeping for myself earlier this week. This quilt has been two years in the making! I'm using Elizabeth Hartman's Mixtape pattern, the Greatest Hits version. I have had the blocks finished for awhile but I finally got around to piecing them together in the past couple of weeks.

I was so excited to start piecing them that I failed to closely consult the instructions, completely missing the part about adding sashing in between each block. Oops! I didn't even realize this until I was about to sew the rows together. There was no way that I was ripping all of the blocks apart, so I decided to just go with it and see what it looked like all together.

This is a happy ending story, because I think I like it more without the sashing than with! It is definitely chaotic, especially with the crazy 90s-esque Habitat prints, but I feel like leaving the sashing out embraces this chaos even more. I added a white border to give a visual break between the blocks and the border, which will be dark purple.

The quilt top ended up being about 10 inches smaller than if I had followed the pattern, but since I'm just making it as a lap quilt this isn't a huge deal.

I have no idea how I want to quilt this, so I think it's going to go back in the "in progress" bag until I decide. I'm thinking I want to venture outside of my normal straight line quilting, but I'm not sure what would go with this pattern/fabric combination. Any suggestions?