Friday, November 18, 2005

Purse, purse, purse

I've spent the last few days making purses. I can never find a purse I like at the price I want to pay (ie not very much). I have specific requirements: shoulder strap, outside pocket to drop my car keys into, inside pockets to organize my stuff, not too big and not too small. So I borrowed a purse from my friend Martha (who also has very specific requirements for her purses) and copied it, with a few refinements. The first one came out well, so I made 2 more. I wrote down my directions so when I want to make another one in a few months, I won't have to totally reinvent the wheel. So here they are:



This is the first one using some Japanese style fabrics that have been sitting in the fabric annex for a while. At first I didn't put the binding around the flap edges but just covered them with a strip of fabric that was wunderundered on. And the strap wasn't right either. After finishing the other two, I re-visited this one and fixed what I didn't like.



I found a piece of yukata (not sure if that's the right word...) that I think I bought from Kasuri Dyeworks in San Francisco a bunch of years ago; also stored in the fabric annex. On this one I quilted around the flower shapes instead of just doing parallel lines. The fortuituous placing of the pink flower was good luck and not good planning.




This is some African design fabric. I was not so lucky on design placement on this one because there is a face mask that ended up upside down on the backside.

I plan to give the pink one to my mother for Christmas, so I hope she's not reading this.

I was tagged by Lisa Call to tell 20 things about me. So here are 5 things to start off:
1. I was born in Chicago in the first half of the last century (doesn't that sound awful?).
2. I dropped out of college after 2 1/2 years to get married. (I eventually finished my degree when I was 40).
3. My children were born in Evanston, Illinois and Towson, Maryland.
4. I have lived in Maryland since 1972. We moved here because my husband is a physician and he interned in Baltimore. After the first winter, where it snowed a total of 1/2", and I was used to 5 months of freezing, snowy, miserable weather in Chicago, I told him I wasn't going back. So we're both still here.
5. One of my first quilts was a Log Cabin Quilt-in-a-Day, tied not quilted, made in Williamsburg blue, cream, and dusky rose. It's looking sort of antique-y now.