Bag and wallet with Tula Pinks Elizabeth line

Posted on September 5, 2015 by Andrea R — 1 Comment

One of the recent bag patterns I’ve made that I really like is the Rosie bag from Swoon patterns. And since I had a half yard bundle of my coveted Elizabeth fabrics from Tula Pink, it was only natural I combine them, right?

For the wallet, I use my tried and true, best wallet ever, A Safe Place. It’s Canadian and I’ve made it six times, easy. I like it because it has enough slots for all my cards and TWO sections for cash. This is great for going back and forth over the border, because I keep Canadian cash on one side, American on the other side. Plus a zippered pocket and a velcro flapped pouch. And it is thin.

I also like that you can use different fabrics for each waller section to really showcase them. I could have placed this face better so it’s not upside down when i hold the wallet, but I’m squeezing out as much as I can from this line. 😉 I made my own bias strips from the green striped fabric. While I stuck to the blues for the bag, I added some of the greens to finish out the wallet.

I finally realized in this version, I need to adjust the wallet pattern just 1/4″ wider on the sides, as the card slots are almost always a snug fit with scant 1/4″ seams. You’ll notice I left off the closing strap as well.

For the bag, I used the blue bat print for lining and the deco shells for the inner and outer pockets.

The outside is this greyed out navy dress weight unidentified fabric I picked up at a thrift shop. It would make nice dress pants or a skirt too, but is all business here.

I also modified the handles to be non-adjustable, because I’ve tested this for me on another version and found the perfect length. So I only needed one handle piece not two as the pattern called for and I skipped the handle connectors, sewing the sides right to the bag sides.

I’ve been having persistent issues with inserting linings into bags, so when I did the lining here, I took a slightly bigger seam allowance, and after the bag was done, I tacked it in a few places at the bottom so it would stay in place.

While I haven’t taken this for a spin yet, I’m pretty happy with how this turned out.

Grey Tula Pink Parisville quilt

Posted on September 18, 2014 by Andrea R — 1 Comment

When I went to hunt down previous posts about this quilt, I shocked myself in realizing it’s been over two years since I started this one.

Oops?

At any rate, the top was done, or so I thought. Then I decided to use up all the jelly roll and make it bigger. All but 4 pieces, which I used as an ipad cozy. (Then I took it apart because I never actually USED it with my ipad. Those bits went in the scrap bin).

So. Then the top was done and waiting for batting and I FINALLY got around to quilting it.

Again inspired heavily by Angela Walters, not to copy it completely but to really learn from her techniques and example, I did a different design in each strip. I also did pebbling in all the grey negative spaces around the strips.

While I emphasized the print strips, for the grey parts I just went all out as if it were one piece. Because it is – the background.

FYI pebbling takes a LOT of thread. I think I used up 5 bobbins, easy. I’m starting to write this stuff down and take notes too.

This quilt wound up around a lap / twin size. I debated back and forth, and eventually listed it in my Etsy shop.

Fibonacci and Angela Walters

Posted on September 15, 2012 by Andrea R — 2 Comments

I swear I’m not stalking Angela, honest! Just a huge fan. In her Free Motion Quilting book, she has a quilt on page 92-92 that she designed and quilted. The book does not contain the pattern for the quilt, but it was pretty simple. Just strips spliced with squares, randomly arranged on a solid background.

Inspired, and with a jelly roll of Tula Pink’s Parisville, I set to work. Got the jelly roll on sale at Craftsy. Great place! I was even going to go with white, but at the fabric store I saw they had a really nice grey solid and grabbed that instead. I haven’t done anything on grey yet. I think it goes quite will with the Parisville colors.

I wanted a random placement of strips and did not want to copy Angela’s quilt exactly, since I also wanted to make it bigger.

So given the strips are 2.5″ wide and there were a few squares, I used 2.5″ as my “unit”. The Fibonacci sequence is 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, etc.. so I have to do a little multiplication to figure out how long to cut some strips. I stopped when I got to numbers longer than the jelly roll.

For reference, I cut some pieces like this, not counting the squares (1 unit):
2 – 5″
3 – 7.5″
5- 12.5″
8 – 20″
13 – 32.5″
21 – 52.5″ so that was too long to cut from a 42″ strip of fabric.

More playing around:

I also started to cut some of the grey background fabric in the same lengths but will probably use longer pieces, or add more grey. I want a lap or maybe bed sized quilt. Something just for me to curl up under.