Doggy Bag

Last month around this time something internal switched itself off, and I've spent the last 4 weeks drifting through a depression. I could get the bare minimum done that any given day required, but for the most part I acted as a lap for Zoe and read Dick Francis novels, starting with his first and chain reading the days away.

Last weekend it became apparent that I was going to have to get my rear in gear and get some sewing done. The annual Competition for Sweet Adelines Region 10 is coming up this Saturday, and I wanted to make a couple of things for my chorus Secret Sister. I mainly wanted to make a personalized Cabana Mesh Tote bag for her, and I knew it would take several days.

I started with this, a hastily photographed signature on a sign-up sheet at one of our rehearsals. My i-for-idiot flip-phone doesn't do close-up photography well.

She's a big fan of dachshunds, owning several, so I wanted my doxie fabrics to feature in the bag I was planning. Trouble was, all my doxies had been sewn up into a 24"x24" Scrappy Trip Around the World square, which was hanging around with no plans for its future.

It all started back in 2021, when I needed to make a prototype TATW to learn the technique before making several gift blocks of that pattern.

Then, a year later, I made a second 12.5" block to illustrate the tutorial I created for ensuring nesting seams.

And somewhere in the following 36 months I made two more blocks (using the final scraps from this project) and sewed them all up into a 24.5" square. (Did I take a picture of it? No I did not.) Perhaps I was thinking about a large throw pillow, ultimately?
 

Regardless, it's been lurking about for quite some time, and ALL my doxie scraps were in it. So it was around those 144 scrappy squares that I decided to plan the Cabana Tote. One big section was unstitched from the main, and made into the back portion of the bag (the center 5x5 section makes a pocket).

This panel is 9 squares by 5 squares, the outer columns folded under and into the sides of the bag in this photo.

The front features the embroidered signature, bordered with more hunks of squares unstitched from the main piece.

That pink square sitting on the mesh was the only piece left over when all was assembled, and went back into the 2.5" bin of squares. The signature is in the center of the front pocket.

The main piece was starting to look very picked-over at this point, and I needed to do some additional un- then re-sewing to get two 9-squares-x-2-squares panels for the top borders (remember--the outer squares are folded under and into the sides of the bag).

By this point it was clear I was running out of enough squares to complete the handles. They'd require, if I was to follow the plan, two 18-squares-x-2-squares panels, and there simply weren't enough!

However, I had one very long strip of the pink "awesome" doxie fabric in my 2.5" drawer, so I used that to form 6" ends of each handle strip. Those sections would become the knots that held the handles in place (and I was very glad not to have additional seams to fight with when making those knots!!!)

That left a shortfall of 8" per handle, so I decided to make the middle portion of each handle out of the brown wood-grain-looking fabric I'd used throughout. The handles of my quartet bag were slightly discolored in that section, so I figured brown would hide things very nicely.

However, when I opened my bin that should've held that fabric (if any was left), what I rediscovered was this awkward chunk, culled from the Community First! Quilters' legacy stash:

How perfect is that for a doggy-themed bag? And that's what filled the 8"-9" gap in the middle of the handles.

Once the Cabana Tote was done, I decided to make a jewelry bag as well (also called a snap/flex pouch). One of her favorite colors is purple, and I had some donated purple satin fabric, and a 16' metal tape measure that smelled of cockroaches (don't ask--I don't know why it did but it was disturbing), and a quilt pattern of our chorus logo. I sandwiched some batting scraps with some Not-100%-cotton fabric from Mom's stash, traced the Chisholm Trail logo onto some Glad Press'n Seal, and used my embroidery machine's 4" hoop to hold everything taut (somewhere I have a small circular embroidery hoop, but this one I could put my hands on immediately). I carefully quilted the layers together on my Brother machine.

Picking out the pieces of plastic wrap was a bitch, as I knew it would be going in.

The finished product:

This pouch now holds a bracelet featuring Region 10's logo, and a gift card for her favorite restaurant. It's been tucked into the Cabana Tote, and the whole kit 'n' caboodle wrapped in a paper gift bag for presentation this Friday night.

And somehow, from somewhere, my quilting mojo has made its way back to me. I'm looking forward to entering my studio with new energy next week, Competition behind me and new quilts to create before me!