Friday, March 21, 2008

Tote Bag Happiness

Despite my professing my love of Tim Gunn, the sewing machine, I have yet to post anything about sewing. Here is a picture of the second love of my life and my little sewing station.

I promise it is not nearly as dreary as the lighting makes it look. It is actually quite perfect. I am able to have my sewing station set up pretty much all the time which is a great help. I don’t have to put things away at night and try to remember where I was once I sit back down. I can even leave things in the sewing machine over night! One day I might like an additional table or a bit bigger workspace but there is something to be said for being able to have my cutting mat, ironing bored and Tim on one table. The only real thing I would change is the table height; it is just a little short for me while sewing. And if I am being honest a cutting surface that I didn’t have to bend over would rock. But other then all of that I am a happy clam here.

One of my first projects with the new machine was grocery store totes. Although I love to cut up plastic bags and find new uses for them, I also love not acquiring them in the first place. I feel like no matter how hard we try we still end up with an overflowing pile. So my goal was to make us enough totes that we could do a big grocery shopping and not need to get any plastic bags. Or my guy could leave a few in his car or at work and we could still go grocery shopping. I am still working on acquiring that magic number. I haven’t found out what the magic number is it yet. I have managed to get my tote making down to a pretty fine science. I have been using old sheets and upholstery fabric scraps thus far. I have also made a couple out of those weird fabrics that seem to be passed down through families and must have been on sale because there is such a large amount of such an ugly thing.

Somehow my tote making went from practical to a little fancy with this one. But I love it. It is the tote I take everywhere for all that spill over stuff one takes with them: extra sweater, knitting, large books. I have even transported a pie. I drew a simple flower pattern and traced it onto fusible web and then in a true obsessive moment hand stitched each flower around the edge. The flowers are actually not this pink and more modeled. You can tell it was one of my first projects with the new machine because I added the feather stitch to the handle for no other reason then it was cool.

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