Staying Cool

It's another toasty day out there. Now that my A/C is working again, I stayed inside where it was nice and cool. It was a perfect day to wash all the bedding and hang it out; duvet cover, bottom sheet, mattress pad, pillowcases. I also am airing out my light summer duvet. I am fortunate my 'passive solar dryer' is just steps outside the door from my main floor laundry room.

Although everything was dried in a jiffy, I left everything out in the sun until later. The bed is going to smell so good tonight when I crawl into it.

I seem to be on a project bag-making jag. I unearthed a little mini charm pack from my stash that I had no recollection of buying. However, I had a zipper and coordinating fabric I could use for the back so I got busy with my gridded fusible interfacing. 

I saw a YouTube video about using charm squares and noted that sometimes the 2 1/2" is measured from the inside of the pinked (zigzag) edge and sometimes it is from the outside points. The gridded interfacing I am using has exact 2 1/2" squares so I had to trim off the pinked edges to make them fit well.

Again, I laid them out in checkerboard fashion. However I needed 49 squares for my 7 x 7 grid and the charm pack only had 42. Luckily I had some random blue squares left over from other projects and they fit in quite nicely. A couple were from the Yukata project and a couple of others from the Summer Eclipse Iceberg fabric . The quilted part is 7 x 6 squares and the 7th row is used for the part above the zipper on the front.

The backing fabric was some of the discounted 0.6m remnant I bought at Bolts and Bobbins a couple of weeks ago - Moda Canvas Ink. I also used it for the strip under the zipper. A fat quarter is also large enough for this project.

This time I quilted the checkerboard through the dark squares. I got to use my chalk marking tool again now that I have more chalk which I had obtained from Bolts and Bobbins. The gadget is that red thing on the left. You can see the white reservoir where the chalk goes. On the rounded end is a little wheel that deposits the chalk. This is a good alternative to using a white marking pen on the dark fabric as the chalk just brushes away once it has served its purpose. 

I do use my walking foot whenever I'm sewing over anything with batting. However today it wasn't advancing the fabric properly so I had to provide some assistance and push it through a bit.

This is the 6th project bag I've recently made that I'm planning to sell. I've been doing some comparison pricing on Etsy and have decided $40CAD is a fair price. Some of my stitching peeps will have first dibs before I take them to sell at our stitching retreat in the fall.

I like that I'm able to continue 'shopping from my stash' when creating these projects. I'm getting down to my last lengths of vinyl, though. I do miss having a Fabricland nearby as it was always so handy to run out and pick up sewing supplies as I've needed them. Now the closest one is in Pickering. Our local quilt shops don't carry the array of zipper colours and lengths that I like. Michaels only sells white, ecru, navy, and black zippers. My preferred length is 16" or longer as my project bags finish to about 14 1/2" wide.  Then the zipper is just trimmed down to the size after all is assembled.

I have 2 other quilted checkerboards in blue colourways that can be finished into bags fairly quickly. 

I'm also toying with making some zipper bags that could be used for knitting projects or cosmetics - like these I made ages ago.

I sure wish I had more of those fabrics.

I also made matching luggage tags.

I still have some of this fabric.