Bag mania

This nonsense needs to stop.

First, I finished the last of the mini zipper bags. There are 12 here but Mom took one so I made 13 in all. What a great use of this special fabric because I only had small pieces. They were way too stiff for quilts but perfect for these little bags. I think most of these will be Christmas gifts, possibly filled with handmade soaps. Click on this link for the tutorial for these pouches.

​It probably would have been good if I had stopped there but two other ideas/thoughts came together to make a bigger obsession

In the Spring I made some "boy" things and made gift bags with the leftovers. I never really thought about making drawstring bags for myself for anything other than gift bags. I mostly use totes or plastic grocery bags as project bags for my crochet and travel sewing. But I do watch quite a few YouTube crochet channels and they often talk about making/buying drawstring or zippered totes for their crochet projects. That seems to make a lot more sense than open totes because things can't fall out of a closed bag. So that idea has been in the back of my mind recently.

Then Monday I told you about cleaning off the cutting table and finding the Spam fabric. I made the pink bag for Anne with her leftover fabric and then I made the mistake of looking thought some of my bins of "special" fabrics and things got crazy from there. I made the National Parks bags first and shared those in Friday's post too.
I should have put everything away right at that point and gotten back to my other projects.

​But I didn't. Yesterday I went absolutely insane.

I had 2 fabrics like this that were gifts to me several years ago. I made a large quilt tote from one piece of this fabric. I made 3 of those totes and use them all the time. They are my Show and Tell bags for quilt club meetings and I use then for travel bags for towels and bedding. The other piece has been sitting in my stash waiting for a "special" project. I love this fabric made into project bags! These are big bags that will easily hold everything for a baby blanket crochet project.

Then I found this fabric that Anne gave me at Christmas. She carved the bird stamp and printed this hand dyed fabric for me. A gradient scrap was perfect for the cuff of the bag. I love the bird fabric so much and it's going to be great to actually see it from time to time when it has a crochet project in it. There was only about 4" left of that fabric so this was a perfect use.

Then I found a piece of fabric that was about 5 feet long and 14" wide. I made it from the leftovers of the Fireworks quilt. I took all of the leftovers, cut them into 2.5" strips and sewed them together kind of like a jelly roll race. It's been in my stash for almost 2 years. It seemed like it would make fun bags too and I was right. I actually made 3 bags with this fabric but one is already in use.

​Then I thought I should write a tutorial so that I will remember how I made these should I ever need another bag. The tutorial needed to be done on a small bag and that sent me off to another drawer with smaller fabrics.

That's right, 3 more bags! The tutorial will probably be ready next week and is done with the metallic and orange bag but I found the sun printed black denim and it was just big enough for a bag for my  crochet hook cases (which I can't find at the moment). The little orange bag was made only because I found that little scrap of fabric and had a yellow zipper nearby. 

I finished the last bag just before dinner last night and them I put everything away. I am done making bags even though I found at least 10 more fabrics that would make great bags!

After dyeing today I'm going to get back to cutting out the last of the patriotic fabrics and get a quilt loaded to quilt. Making doll outfits is even seeming a little more sane at the moment so I might cut out a couple of those too.