Distracted by bags

I’ve recently been trying to find ways of using up a lot of old fabric scraps, and have thought of recycling them into shopping bags.  Cherri recommended this pattern for a simple tote bag

http://www.quiltingdaily.com/media/p/22016.aspx

which I found very straightforward to make, and a good basis for a decorative pieced shopping bag

 However, as this was supposed to be just an exercise in recycling and not a serious project, I didn’t want to spend a lot of time on it, and instead of piecing fabric together to make the bags, I tried a kind of “faux-patchwork”. This just involved stitching fabric scraps onto a backing fabric, using decorative patchwork stitching. It turned out well and the work went very fast

Bags made of fabric scraps stitched together with a faux-patchwork technique

However, although I liked the results, it didn’t really use up a lot of scraps and I reckon I would have had to make about a hundred bags to make any serious inroads on my scrap store. Also I felt like getting back to embroidery. But the tote bag pattern was well suited to embroidery – that large central panel was just the right size for a piece of embroidery done with the large Innovis hoop

So I drew out a simple vase of flowers in a Jacobean style, stitched it out twice (one for each side of the bag) and made it up into a bag with an old piece of denim that I‘ve had around for years.

The Jacobean vase embroidery, and the denim bag made from it

I can think of a lot of designs that would go well on bags like this and I'll start thinking of some new approaches. However for the moment that’s enough bags. I may do some more later to go into a local craft show this autumn, but now I really have to get on with projects like the Optical Goat and the Charley Harper bellpull panel