Done.

I was off to such a good start updating this blog regularly, but I probably should have known better than to launch my blog right when the school year is starting. I have been a middle school teacher for a VERY long time, and there is nothing busier than the first week of school (and the days leading up to it). The last post I made was the date before my teacher workdays started, so you can probably guess what happened. It got a little crazy.

Crazy, however, is the reason I sew! I need that break in my day to focus my brain away from all the other stressful things and just create. So, while I didn’t get to blogging, I did finish the rest of my projects from my big cutting party!

First up is Got Your Back 2.1 from ByAnnie. I had some fun with this – adding interesting machine embroidery during the construction process. One nice thing about doing that is my embroidery machine is in my home office, near my desktop PC, so I was able to run it and monitor the stitch-out while I multi-tasked some necessary start-of-school tasks. (There are so many things to do that only have to be done once at the beginning of the year, but they do eat up your time…)

The backpack has a subtle “cats & books” theme, but I couldn’t help myself and put the “,la” (with a comma that looks like a cat!) on the back side of the bag as well as a motivational statement on the inside pocket – just for me (“Inner peace begins with four words…not my f*cking problem“).

Once this gem was finished, my “Not Your Basic Blue Bag” was up next. While this was a much easier make for the most part, it’s always a challenge to wrangle larger fabric pieces without some slippage. I don’t obsess. I cut everything even and if it’s slightly different as a finished bag, I don’t care. Close enough! This is a big bag that would be great for a shopping trip of throwing extra pillows into it when traveling. I had fun using some past years’ All Carolinas Shop Hop fabric. Instead of leather handles, I had a perfect sized cork remnant to make handles out of!

Now that we are past the first few days of school and I’ll getting the chaos under control (ish), I came back to the very last project from this batch – the Ava backpack from Sallie Tomato. This one is big enough to hold my work laptop and I think I want to use it for that.

I got a little extra with Ava and added some fun cork tags on top of the irridescent quilted section and a couple of woven labels in the seams. I also went a little rogue on the directions and did a bound inside lining because I felt like that made it easier to work with. The directions were confusing in places, and as an experienced bagmaker, that is usually when I go rogue and make it work for me. The outside is WPC (waterproof canvas) and vinyl. The inside is cotton canvas. I used a purple parachute clip on the main flap closure and the webbing is seatbelt-style webbing.

So, here they are – all of my finished projects from my last cut party! They cover my coffee table (which is really my sewing/cutting table), but they all can be piled into my super-sized Carolina bag!

Now, that this cutting session/project cycle is completed, I think my next one will be apparel-related. I’ll also be adding some shopping and pattern reviews to the blog, so stay tuned now that I have the start of the school year handled.

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