At the end of April, I spent three days sewing in a nunnery in the foothills of the Rockies, with 14 other members of my ASG (American Sewing Guild) chapter. It was our annual sewing retreat.
Between organizing the retreat, getting used to my new job, and optimizing my new daily routine, my project planning for the retreat was… nonexistent.
Not that I didn’t give it any thought.
I did. But the answer always came down to, how am I supposed to know today what I will want to sew next week?
Long story short, last-minute decisions saved the day. I chose the Project Bags pattern from By Annie, and cut out four of them, jumbo size.
I also brought a project that needed hand-stitching, my knitting, and a book. Just in case, you know.
I made the first two project bags at the retreat.
The main fabrics (visible through the clear vinyl) are from an old Tula Pink collection called Pinkerville. The coordinating fabric is a current Hexies pattern, and the quilted part is backed with a matching(ish) Grunge.
Pinkerville? Grunge? Why yes, there is a story behind the fabrics. Let me fill you in 😄
The Grunge fabric came first. In 2016, we were stationed in Oklahoma and one day we stopped at a small quilt store on the way back to base. I signed up for their newsletter, and promptly forgot all about it. A week or so later, they called me to say I won something called fat quarters and when am I coming to pick them up?
Huh? Me? I won something? Well, okie dokie then. We made another trip to the quilt shop, and sure enough, they handed me a pretty package of fabrics in rainbow colors.
It sat in my stash, waiting for the right project. Or more precisely, I had no idea what that stack was, but it brought me joy every time I saw it so in the stash it stayed.
A few years later, I added another colorful stack of fat quarters to my stash. A few more years went by, and it finally occurred to me to pair them together. I kept the pairings I liked, and put the rest on the freebie table at our ASG meeting.
And so here we are today, nearly nine years out from that one phone call, and these beautiful fabrics finally have a job.
Here are the other two project bags I’d cut out before the retreat. Instead of the Hexies, I went with Tiny Dots for the coordinating fabric. (I didn’t get these two bags done until well after the retreat, but I’m leaving them here because they’re part of a set.)
The pattern calls for square corners and mitered binding. I’m not a fan of the look, preferring the rounded corners of my previous By Annie projects, so I rounded these as well. I think they are prettier.
See for yourself: here they are all together, in all their colorful glory:
On three of the project bags, I did the binding the way the pattern calls for, all machine-stitched. But on the last one, I finished the binding by hand. And I’m going to do that from here on out because it just looks nicer.
Moving on to my other retreat project…
Yes, another In Control caddy. This one is for my knitting friend Catherine – she chose the fabrics and hardware. The colors are quite peaceful, don’t you think?
I had it almost finished before the retreat – all the machine stitching was done, and it only needed hand-stitching on the binding. So I took it with me and finished it on the last day as I chatted with Jessie, our resident artist extraordinaire.
I also made Catherine this nifty Drop Zone zipped tray out of the leftovers.
As far as productivity, I joked to my friends Bonnie and Pam that this was more of chatting retreat. The way it went was, sew a seam, chat for 30 minutes, sew another seam, chat for 30 minutes 😂
But we all still accomplished quite a bit. I’m pretty proud of my new project bags, and seeing the joy on Catherine’s face was priceless.
*******
Things I learned:
- I like finishing the bindings by hand, and I want to do them that way going forward, regardless of pattern instructions.
- Rounded corners are definitely the way to go.
- It would behoove me to consider where to put my label before I stitch everything together, to minimize the sessions with my seam ripper.
- Yes, you can get black pencil marks out of an off-white zipper tape – with a bit of Ivory soap on a wet manicure brush. (Thank you, Mary!)
- An amber night light needs to be in my travel bag because otherwise I might be stuck with a blue light or nothing.
********
Record-keeping: The four project bags took 4 yds of fabric total, and Catherine’s caddy took 2.25 yds. That puts me at 40 yds sewn YTD.
And now we’re all caught up on my April sewing projects. I have a pair of crazy pants to show you next, but I need good pictures first. So stay tuned, and happy sewing!
