Pink Penguin bag

A couple of years ago my quilting friend Sarah introduced our Patchwork Group to a lovely reversible drawstring bag. It measures 8.5" tall by 7.5" wide and is really useful for carrying sewing threads, needle cases, scissors etc to class.  Sarah has made each member of our group one of these bags as birthday gifts. It's quite amusing to look  around the room at our Patchwork meetings and see everyone's pretty bag being used. Because they are made from scraps each one is different.

I have made several - including one each for my husband and me to keep our various battery chargers safe in one place. So handy when we are packing for travelling, just pick up the bag of battery chargers and pop into the luggage.  No more hunting around the house for chargers!

With this in mind I decided to make one for my good friend Judy.  It's her birthday next week and as she is forever dashing around the country looking after various members of the family I thought a Battery charger bag might be useful. 
You can find the excellent Tutorial on Pink Penguin"s blog: Click on the Tutorials button and then on Reversible Drawstring bag.

Everything came from stash, the buttons from my button box.  I was very pleased to find the pair of small yellow flower buttons which I sewed on the ends of the drawstrings.  The lining is made from one of the FQs in a pack which was a gift from another Patchwork friend Ruth. Funnily enough a few days previously I cut some patches from another FQ in this pack, for another commission Baby Boy quilt I am currently working on.

Here's the bag:

Front

Back

I used 32 x 2.5" squares from my scrap stash and next day added another 12 back into stash.
On Thursday I was gifted a bag of scraps, mostly strips which went immediately into my Scrap Strips Stash bags and other odd shaped scraps were cut into various sizes of squares and strips and the small odd shaped leftovers went into my Crumb blocks stash.  Nothing ever goes to waste here!!

The joy of giving

In my last post I wrote about a Spider Web Quilt that my Patchwork Group was making for our youngest member Sarah.
It has not been made for the usual reasons we gift quilts to members: a 'Big" birthday, 60, 70, 80, 90, even 100! Or because someone has been ill or receiving treatment.  It was because Sarah is so much younger than all of us we thought it was about time she received a quilt as over the years she has contributed to everyone else's! And we knew she would be thrilled!  And we were thrilled to make it for her and anticipate her surprise.

Sarah makes a lot of baby quilts: for friends and also commissions from friends and we know she loves bright colours and hand stitching with Perle threads. We also knew she loved the Spider Web pattern as we used that last year for a 60th birthday gifted quilt.

A No-brainer then to make Sarah one. We used a fine pale cream muslin (from Ruth's stash) for the background kites and strips of all the colours she loves. 

The result was this lovely quilt:

 

Everyone in the Group contributed strips from their stash and we shared them out so there was a continuity of colours and fabrics throughout the quilt.

Here's a Close-up of A Close-up of some of the spider webs.e Spider Webs.

I finished the quilt off by tying the centres of each web and sewing a button in the centre of each kite star. Ruth provided the buttons from her stash as she had a packet of buttons in exactly the colours we has used in the quilt: red, green, hot pink, shell pink, orange and green.

My attempt at an "arty" photo, the quilt draped over my armchair!

And the backing which was pieced:

Win, our 100 year old member has been in hospital and a convalescence home for a few months so she  recently asked a friend to sort out lots of fabrics for our Group. We all chose a few pieces and made a donation to Win's favourite Charity and then the rest we have kept as our "Group Stash" to use in further Group Quilt projects. The lovely soft flannel mauve and white checked fabric and the fuchsia pink binding fabrics both came from Win's fabrics. The piece of flannel was not quite large enough so Lynne found a lovely strip of fabric which matched so beautifully with the checked fabric.

This morning was our last Patchwork meeting before Christmas so we presented it to Sarah today.
She was utterly amazed at the gift, thrilled with the choice of design, the colours, the softness, etc etc!

In fact she was almost in tears as she had never imagined receiving a quilt.  Sarah sat with it on her lap for the rest of the morning and said she was going to have it tucked round her knees when she watched television this evening. 
We couldn't have wished for a better response!  Giving is such a joy, isn't it?