a new beginning

I have a few posts to catch up on to share some finished (but yet to be blocked) knitting projects and one exciting (!) quilt finish from July. But the MOST EXCITING thing that's happened in the last couple of months is that we bought a house! After nine years of living in the same condo in Palo Alto we packed up our belongings and moved south to Morgan Hill just a couple of weeks ago. 

I'm pleased to report that there is a local yarn shop as well as a local quilt shop. And even more pleased that I now have my own craft room. Mom and Dad visited last week for the Stanford-NU football game and got to be our first guests. Of course, this also meant that the girls had to make something to inaugurate the craft space!

The quilt shop in town has a good selection of fabrics, but what I like the best are the patterns for smaller projects they have in stock. There are lots of samples made up, which makes it so much easier to want the thing, doesn't it? Mom and I each picked out a pattern and some fabric before we left, and the last night they were in town she and I got to working on the bag she chose. 

The pattern is the Orange Dot Quilts H Bag in the mini size by Dora Cary. The fabric on the outside is a decor weight print we found at the shop, and the contrasting print inside is a regular cotton print I've had in my stash forever. It's an Anna Maria Horner print that was going to be curtains in our last place, but I never got around to it. The big flowers were a perfect match for this project. 

As we cut, the only "fussy" cutting we worried about was the panel shown above. We centered it as best we could and just let the rest of the fabric do what it would. Turns out that on the other side another panel got centered pretty well, too! The bag is reinforced with some iron on interfacing and was actually pretty simple to construct. The dowels are such a neat idea, and were not at all difficult to incorporate. The other neat thing about them is that you can just roll up the bag around them when it's not being used (like when it has to go in a suitcase...). I'm also pretty sure this could be reversible, especially if you used the same weight fabric for the outside and the lining.

I did a little bit of decorative stitching around the top edges using a preprogrammed stitch on my machine that I thought looked like little bird tracks. The thread is a light blue that matches the print inside and contrasts just enough on the outside to be subtle but noticeable. The whole project took maybe an hour and a half from start to finish and it turned out looking quite polished. More to come, I'm sure.

The craft room isn't quite "done" yet, but it certainly felt good to get in the first project. I think the more I work in here, the more I'll know just how I want to have it set up for all the different things I get up to.