Well that week just flew by! Here it is already Friday again and I’ve seen some gorgeous projects this week.
This week’s Featured Five:
With Easter right around the corner, I’ve been seeing some great Easter projects and crafts, like these Modern Industrial Style Concrete Eggs from The Kim Six Fix. I love the look of these eggs and I think I would leave them out year round.
Continuing with easter eggs, you have to check out these Hand Painted beauties from Craftberry Bush. They are gorgeous! I wish I had that kind of talent.
Marie from The Interior Frugalista shows us how to turn ordinary glass domes into fabulous Cloches for displaying our little treasures. Who hasn’t seen an assortment of those horrid plastic anniversary clocks at their local thrift store just begging for some upcycle love?
Paint Yourself A Smile shows us how to make a Bunny Grapevine Wreath that is adorable, but if you prefer the more rustic farmhouse look then Simply Designing has you covered with her Floral Bunny Wreath.
Have a Fabulous Weekend!
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Finally! The tutorial and pattern for this bag I’ve promised. It was surprisingly time-consuming to redraw the pattern and make it nice and clean so it would make sense to everyone else. So, click here >>> >here< <<< for the pattern. I don’t care if you make and sell a million dollars worth of these bags – just don’t post my pattern on your own site.
Materials for Asymmetric Bag:
1 meter fusible interfacing.
1/2 meter each of exterior fabric and lining fabric.
1/4 – 1/2 meter of accent fabric (optional – you could make exterior in a single color)
2 – 7″ zippers
your choice of bag hardware for strap and closure. There are so many possibilities and choices, it’s entirely up to you what you use.
Assembly of your asymmetric bag:
Attaching accent fabric to bottom of bag:
Once you’ve cut out all of your pieces, trim the fusible interfacing 1/4″ on all sides to reduce bulk in your seams.
You will need to decide which side of the bag your exterior pocket will be on. Since it’s at an angle, it’s more comfortable to use if you follow my handy little Sharpie notes on the photos. Fuse your interfacing to all exterior pieces and half of each pocket lining.
Once you have fused all of your interfacing, assemble the exterior. The photo above shows you how the pieces go together. Sew with a 1/2″ seam.
Another little Sharpie note for pocket placement.
Inserting the zipper and outside pocket:
Find the vertical center of your pocket lining and your bag exterior.
Draw a line one inch from top edge on wrong side of pocket lining.
Draw another line 3/8″ from first line.
Mark each end 3 1/8 from center. You should finish with a long skinny rectangle 3/8″ x 6 1/4″ long. Mark your cut lines as shown. Pin to bag, right sides together, centers matched.
Sew all the way around with your stitch length set to 2.5 on the sides, but change to 1 from 1/2″ before corners until around the other side.
Cut down the center to 1/2″ from each side. Angle towards each corner as close as possible to stitching without cutting through. Flip the lining through to the other side and press.
See how pretty that turned out?
Center and pin your zipper underneath as shown and top-stitch through all layers. Sew each side first in the same direction then go back and sew across each end so your zipper doesn’t twist.
Pin the other half of the lining to your bag – wrong sides together and sew all the way around with a 1/2″ seam.
One pocket finished! Only one more zipper to go, but first lets put the rest of the outside of this bag together.
Finishing the outside of the bag:
You will need to sew each side and the bottom, but leave the notched out part unsewn.
Press seams open. A rolled up towel can help with that chore, just use it like a mini ironing board shoved inside the bag.
Refold the bag and sew across your corner.
Congratulations! You’ve finished the outside of your bag.
Putting the lining and inside pocket together:
For the lining, attach the pocket to one side with the bottom at least 3/4 of an inch above corner notches of bottom. Assemble both halves of the lining, exactly the same as the outside of the bag except you need to leave an opening along one side for turning.
Do stitch the top and bottom of that side though.
Finishing off:
Pin lining and exterior – right sides together and sew 1/2″ seam. Trim away 1/4″ from exterior seam allowance to reduce bulk, then turn right side out, press, and topstitch.
That’s my sweet boy Louie photo-bombing in the corner.
All that’s left now is the strap!
I could not find a good match in webbing for this fabric, so I made a strap using the fabric. There is an extremely good tutorial for making bag straps >here<.
The only thing I did differently was seamed the ends for a neater finish.
Attach your strap just below the accent fabric on each side.
And that’s it! What do you think of this fabric? It is the weirdest thing – I hate the colors of it at night, but love them during the day.
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Hi Friends! What sort of plans have you got for the weekend? Myself, I’m the type who delights in planning to have no plans, but I do have a couple of projects I’m hoping to finish. I’d also like to get a start on cleaning up the yard if the weather co-operates. We will see what happens!
I’m going to start this weeks Five on Friday with these amazing Mid-Century chairs from Marie at Frugalista. All of her pieces have an amazing style that I adore, and you really should take a look at these armchairs. Marie covered them in a gorgeous retro floral that works perfectly for her MCM armchairs. You can see it >here<.
Now what about some sweet floral bunny tea towels for Easter? With a ruffled hem and pom-pom tails they’re probably more decorative than useful, but they’re too pretty to dry dishes anyhow. Flamingo Toes has the tutorial >here<, and I bet you have a couple of floral fabric scraps in your stash that would be perfect!
Then there’s these painted wooden tulips! Perfect to add a pop of color to your Easter displays and they were super cheap to make too. You can find the details >here<.
If you’re more Industrial than MCM, then you really must check out this printer cart tutorial. And who says you have to make it a printer cart? That’s the beauty of DIY, making what you need for where you need it right? You can see it >here<.
And for my last share – check out this sweet bunny collage! I am loving these button collages. Perfect for any season and a great way to use up a button stash if you’ve got one. If not, check your craft section for bags of buttons sold by color. You can see it >here<.
Happy Friday and happy crafting!
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If you have ever thought about starting a garden or craft blog of your own see how easy it is>>here<<.
I am so happy with this cross-body bag I made! If you’ve got a keen eye, you’ll see I’ve once again used the MCM atomic prints created by Joe of Ambient Wares – you can download it for free >here< and see the adorable MCM plant stands they made with it! They even have hairpin legs!
Printing on Fabric with a laser printer!
I printed their designs on fabric using a black & white laser printer.
So what you do is tear off a piece of freezer paper and with your iron set to highest setting (which unless you have a commercial/professional iron is nothing) and the steam off, press the shiny side of your freezer paper to your fabric.
Once it’s attached, trim your fabric/paper sandwich to either letter (8.5″ x 11″) or legal sized (8.5″ x 14″). I used legal for the bag. Go over all the edges again with your iron making sure it’s firmly attached together all the way around. Be especially certain at the edge that will feed into the printer.
Use a sticky lint roller to make sure there are no loose threads or lint on the side you are printing. Set your printer to print best quality and using your bypass tray, print your design on the fabric. The freezer paper backing should just peel away.
I did some test pieces and washed them to test if the design would be colorfast. I discovered as long as you go over the design with a hot iron first to set it, on my fabric the design stayed through washing.
Making the cross body bag.
This is just an overview, I want to tweak the pattern and test it a bit more before I do a full tutorial, but I purchased 1/2 meter each of my 3 different fabric choices.
I had already drafted my pattern the night before, so I pinned everything out and cut my pieces.
With no clear right or wrong side, I kept questioning if I had it right. I expected the pieces to look more like the pieces of a puzzle when they were side by side.
I interfaced the exterior fabrics and pocket linings with fusible interfacing. There was a time I would have had black interfacing for my dark fabric, this time I had only white and it worked out fine.
I attached my accent piece to the top of each plain piece to make the front and back of the bag.
Then I marked out the zipper placement on the pocket lining.
Here is the lining turned to the inside of the bag.
How it looks on the outside. More lighting would have been nice!
Zipper placement!
Pin the bag at the corners and seams, right sides together. Don’t sew the notch between the pins.
Press everything open.
Shift the fabric around, seams together and sew across the notch to shape the bottom of the bag.
Here I’m inserting the zipper and interior pocket.
You sew it into a pocket after inserting the zipper. Once I had the zipper in, I sewed the lining together in the same way as the exterior, but with an opening left in the side for turning.
The strap is adjustable so you can use it as a regular purse but I prefer the convenience of a cross-body bag. I love this sparkly webbing.
Here you can see how the exterior pocket is under the flap. I love how nicely the lines & dots atomic pattern and the lining fabric play together.
The buckle is rather cool, even if the quality was somewhat disappointing.
I’m so happy with the way this cross-body bag came together! I can’t wait to share the pattern and a full tutorial with you!
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I’m just going to say it – I’m a complete geek for all things MCM, especially the Atomic style patterns of the day. Fortunately for me, so are Joe and Angie of Ambient Wares and Joe created two amazing patterns you can download for free >here<!
I have so many ideas for these patterns, but the first thing I did with them was make some darling planters for my growing collection of succulents.
Initially, I painted two pots white and another two turquoise. I decoupaged Joe’s pattern to the rims of my pots. Unfortunately, when I sprayed them with sealer, the color of the clay bled through the white paint, making it appear dirty next to the bright white patterned rims. So I masked off the decorative rim and hit them all with the spray paint – Rustoleum Chalked in Serenity Blue – which turned out to be a perfect MCM color.
Planting a Dish Garden with Succulents
Once everything was dry and sealed time for the fun! The thriller, filler, spiller rule applies to dish gardens as well as outdoor planters. I created a pleasing arrangement, then I used my favorite planting trick.
Gently remove the plants from their pots and then place the empty pots as space holders.
Add soil and tamp in place around the empty pots.
Take out one of the pots and there’s your planting space.
Pop a plant in and move to the next ‘space’.
Here you can see the finished arrangement with a few more plants added in.
One of the smaller pots, still using the formula of thriller, filler, spiller. I love the way this little pot came together with the delicate blue trailer, the fuzzy leaves of the filler and the spiky dark green height behind.
Here is another small pot. Check out Jaws in there!
This little table used to be my play table as a kid. Now it sits beside my desk under a window.
This little wicker thrift store shelf hangs above.
These little pots with their ‘Atomic’ patterned rims make me happy.
If you enjoyed this post, don’t forget to share it with your friends! For more just like it follow me on Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter or sign up for regular updates by email.
If you have ever thought about starting a garden or craft blog of your own see how easy it is>>here<<.
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