Top Posts of the Year

Happy Blog-iversary!  It’s hard to believe we’ve been up to it for a year already.  We’ve loved sharing our projects and culinary adventures with you.  But which ones have been the most interesting?  Well, as voted by you, with the most number of hits, here’s our top ten parade:

10. Fabric Flower Hair Clip

9. 4th of July Subway Art

8. Pineapple Dessert Pizza with Rum Spiked Whip Cream

7. Little Girl’s Tank Dress

6. Amy Butler Cosmo Bag

 5. Wine Cork Letter Sign

4. How to Create a Chocolate Covered Strawberry Tower 

3. Make an Egg Shaped Easter Basket From String 

  2. Little Girl T-Shirt Ruffle Tank Dress

And last, but not least, running away with the top prize is………….

1. Gold Dusted Mini Chocolate Oscar Statues 

 What will the next year on the blog bring?  Who knows?  But I can’t wait to find out!

– Martta & Heather

Amy Butler Frenchy Bag

So remember when I took the Amy Butler bag class and couldn’t decide which bag to make?  The one I initially ruled out was the Frenchy bag.  But I did pick up the pattern and fabric vowing to make one.  So I’m finally getting around to working on my P.H.D (Projects Half Done), including the Frenchy bag!
Luckily I already had the fabrics pre-washed.

When I was first planning this bag, I wanted to match the handles to the top fabric rather than the main body fabric, so I modified the yardages a bit (’cause we all know these patterns call for waaaaay too much fabric), so here are my supplies

• 1/2 yd. cotton printed fabric for top panels
• 1/2 yd. cotton printed fabric for the body and handles
• 1 yd. cotton fabric for lining
• 2 yd. Décor Bond fusible interfacing
• 1 metallic snap
• 1 coordinating thread

As I was cutting out the pieces, I decided to fussy cut, centering the medallions on each side of the main panels of the bag.  I had plenty of fabric until I decided to make the handles out of the body fabric as well.  So I ended up with extra top panel fabric, which made me decide to use some of the top panel fabric on the interior rather than all lining fabric, which then left me with more lining fabric.  So overall, I throughly used the main exterior print, I’ve got a bit of the top panel print and about a half a yard of the lining fabric left over.  Here are my pieces all cut and interfaced:

You can see I’ve had to piece the shoulder straps together, but this is such a busy print, it’s not too noticeable.  This pattern calls for sew-in interfacing and let’s be honest, we all know I’m lazy so I just went with the décor bond as recommended by Stitch Lab.  It gives the panels of this bag great body to show off the shape and saves me the step of sewing all that in!  Of course, as far as Amy Butler patterns go, this one has waaaay less interfacing than normal.   For which I’m thankful.  Amen.

I assembled the handles first and I think you can hardly see the seam on one of them!  Look close – both seam lines are in the same place!

On to the top panel and main panel assembly.  A neat trick I picked up in the class was to start pinning these from the center.  I really want to pin them edge to edge, but because of the curves on this bag, you just can’t. You’ll end up with a little triangle that hangs off the edge of the panel.

Don’t panic, sew it up, press and like magic, everything will work out perfectly.

After sewing the two main panels together, I took a look at the bag and thought: this top piece is really waaaay too long.  It just looks awkward.

So I thought about trimming it

just a inch and quarter

would that look better?

Well, less is more so I just cut it off.

eeek!

There is just no turning back now.

It’s a good thing I like it.

I repeated this process on the lining panels and then installed the pockets.  The pattern calls for one large pocket on each side, but that struck me as impractical.  I decided to divide at least one side into two pockets.  It was easy to just sew up a center seam on the pocked piece on one side of the lining:

Next, I installed the metallic snap.  A few bloggers mentioned not liking the finishing edge stitch running into the snap.  (The directions call for you to sew up to the snap, skip it and continue on the other side).  I didn’t like the idea of the snap in the way of the seams so I cheated the snap down a bit into the lining.  I’ve still got my reinforcement panel tied into the edge stitching of the lining panels, but it’s a bit lower than the pattern calls for.

This allows me to place my snap away from the edge stitching

Now the interior and exterior were complete!  I just sewed them together, turned, pressed and edged stitched.  This bag turned out great!  A good size, but not huge like many of her other bags.

The interior pockets worked out great and I love that I used the pink fabric so it wouldn’t be a sea of stripes in there!

Overall an easy project that can be assembled in less than 4 hours.

–Martta

Amy Butler Everyday Reversible Shopper

We now return this blog to our regularly scheduled program of bag sewing and granita making….I did make more granita, but you’re just going to have to wait until this weekend when it’s 104 in Austin to enjoy the mojito granita!

Of the Amy Butler bags in her book, this is the easiest!  Definitely start here rather than the Cosmo bag (as I did).  She uses a lot of the same techniques in her bags and you might as well pick them up on a bag that has straight lines before you move on to all those curves!  To make this wonder I combined the mad skillz I learned at the Stitch Lab taking the applique class and Amy Butler bag class.  When I think of the Everyday Shopper, I think grocery tote, so that’s what I decided to applique on to my version of this tote.

I picked up some sturdy batiks for this project.  As mentioned before, Amy Butler loves to give generous fabric allowances.  So I tried to stick with the Stitch Lab recommendations:

• 1 yd. cotton printed fabric for main exterior
• 1-3/4yd. cotton fabric for interior and pockets
• 3 yd. Décor Bond fusible interfacing

But I decided I wanted to have a contrasting pocket so I did play with the yardages a bit and I still had left overs.  The pattern is a snap to cut out and interface compared to other Butler bags.  Here you can see my cut and interfaced results:

Here’s a pro-tip from me to you: A lot of Butler bags call for you to make the exterior first and then the interior.  What?  Why not learn on the interior and then do the exterior that everyone will look at?  In this case, it doesn’t matter as much since the bag is reversible, but you may want to consider this for other bags.  Second tip – she calls for you to stop sewing 1/2″ from the bottom of the bag when you’re assembling the front and side panels.  I don’t know about you, but once I start going in a straight line on my machine, I just forget to stop until I run out of fabric.  I find that if I mark the 1/2″ from the bottom, I’m much better at following this key direction.  Finally, on all her bags, a multitude of sins can be hidden in that bottom panel.  Sew the front and back panel to the bottom panel and if the side panels don’t exactly line up with the bottom panel, just trim them (or the bottom panel) to fit.

Before I installed my pockets I went to town on applique/embroidery land.  My brother pointed out that you can’t really see the Grocery that well, but I pointed out that I’m not the best at embroidery so that’s kinda the way I planned it :0  Hopefully I’ve come out with a reasonable facsimile of grapes, strawberries, and carrots.  The grapes were cut with a circle cutter from Creative Memories that I had laying around and the strawberries and carrots were cut free hand.  I stuck them down with some heat and bond adhesive before outlining and giving detail.  After I completed my embroidery, I sewed the pocket front and back together so all my stitching would be hidden.

The lining and exterior were quick to assemble and then it was on to handle placement.

Next, I pinned together the exterior and interior to finish up the bag, leaving an opening for turning which I marked with double pins, between two of the handles.

I turned the bag easily

Then a quick press and top stitch to finish it off and I was done!  All told, this bag should just take a few hours to complete or as I like to measure it, half an Intervention marathon (sans applique and embroidery of course).

This is a really tall bag – if you plan to practically use it for grocery shopping, you may want to consider making it a bit shorter.  For comparison, I broke out my Whole Foods recycled grocery bag (that I’ve had for ages so ignore any battle scars – like that sticker I put on the front during one shopping trip and didn’t quite come off) for comparison:

And the side view – the Amy Butler bag is a bit narrower:

Finally a line up of a few bags: The Everyday Reversible Shopper, the Whole Foods Recycled Bag, and the Birdie Sling:

Oh, did you want to see what it looks like on the reversible side?  I got a picture of that too – for when you don’t want to grocery shop, here’s the “beach tote” side:

As I said, a great Amy Butler bag to start off with!  Happy Sewing!

–Martta