Stealth Projects Revealed

For Poppy's birthday, I made a checkerboard project bag with a couple of dark and light Susan Winget jelly roll strips and made a couple of others from fabrics in my stash.

I alternated the relatively plain squares with the butterfly squares.

Once again I drew 2.5" squares on interfacing and ironed the squares in place, then with right sides together, sewed the columns of squares along the folds of the interfacing. This video shows that technique.

I'm using my new method of creating the front and back separately then sewing them together, rather than my old way of attaching the large piece to the zipper and folding it over. I finally cut the vinyl the correct size, minimizing excessive trimming at the bottom of the bag once getting ready to sew it all together. (Truth be told, I screwed up the size on the first piece of vinyl I sewed in and had to take the strips above and below the vinyl completely apart and re-do it with the correct size vinyl). 

I had the butterfly charm and coordinating glass bead for the zipper pull in my stash. Woo hoo! Finished size is 13.5" x 11.5".

I also made a personalized scissor case/pincushion.

It's a wonderful Faby Reilly pattern that I stitched for this project months ago. Of course, I left fully finishing it until practically the last minute. I really wanted scissors with a guard as slipping them into the pocket would create wear and tear on the interior fabric. Fortunately Amazon came through again.

It's usually easier to match the threads to the back fabric but I lucked out finding a bit of this red batik that matched the red stitching perfectly.

One reason it took me so long to finish it was the time I spent agonizing over what font I'd use for Poppy's initials. I finally decided on one that I thought would look good stitched over one thread.

The actually assembly was pretty easy. I used a Frixion pen to draw right on the back of the linen which served as my sewing guide. The pen line disappeard with the heat of the iron and was drawn on the back of the linen anyway.

A few of months ago I learned how to paint poppies from this book.

And they turned out pretty well. I thought they'd make a great card. I didn't get a shot of the particular one I gave Poppy but it was pretty similar to this one I did for practice.

15 minutes is about all the attention span I have to create my little paintings. I do need to do some more for cards as I keep running out of them. I know I'll never take the time to make big masterpieces or try to draw, or master any type of realism, but I am enjoying making my little masterpieces.

BTW, Poppy liked all her birthday treats. :-)  And that makes me very happy.