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.

Birds

Although it may snow on Friday here, there are more and more signs of spring appearing. The green leaf tips of daylilies and daffodils are poking up through the soil. And the snowbells and crocuses are already blooming. The birds seem to be more active, and my toddler and I just spotted a tufted titmouse on our morning walk.


The last few days I have been reading Feathers for Lunch, by Lois Ehlert, with my toddler, and he's fascinated with the colors of the birds and their sounds. I didn't realize how much he had become interested in birds until we sat down to do the felted picture project designed by Kleas and recommended by The Crafty Crow.


My son wanted to make a bird picture, and I think it turned out quite nicely. He handed me the colored wool roving and told me what part of the bird it should be, and I placed it on the picture. He liked pounding the wool to felt it, too. (I lightly needle-felted the picture to a square of blue felt for a "frame.")

My son also decided that he needed another pair of binoculars to replace the plastic ones he had broken. So I put together a new set for him using the ubiquitous empty toilet paper rolls. He had fun looking through the binoculars at the bird pictures in Feathers for Lunch, and tomorrow we'll take the binoculars on our walk to try to spot some birds outside.