Dimension

I love everything about sewing bags, especially out of felted wool sweaters. The combination of the wool's weight, softness, and drape make it a pleasure to sew. I love how the shape of a sweater (and working around moth holes!) helps determine the ultimate shape of the purse. For example, the shape of a sweater's sleeve when I cut open the seam determined the lovely bell shape of the flower purse (above).





When I started making wool bags last fall, I sewed them by hand and made them simple in shape, flat, and unlined.






But a chance meeting with my designer friend Maya at the local Salvation Army inspired me to start putting the purses together by machine. What a conceptual leap forward that was! Machine-piecing allowed me to create bags with fullness and dimension.

The octopus purse (above, left) came together easily by machine, and the octopus applique emerged from a piece of felt that I had cut for another project and that ended up with eight "legs". The messenger bag (above, right) was based on a pattern in Betz White's Warm Fuzzies book, a perpetual fount of inspiration for me.

Luckily I still have one of the earliest, flat bags I made, the dove purse (above) for my daughter. It's now on my sewing table and is in the process of undergoing a dimensional metamorphasis.

Now it has a bottom (made from quilter's template plastic), and soon it will have an interfacing-reinforced lining for extra structure.

From a design and skills perspective, it helps me to look back to where I started and appreciate the evolution of my bag-making skills. So when I get frustrated and feel that I'm not finishing projects quickly enough or well enough, I can realize that starts and stops and big leaps forward are just part of the creative process.