Laptop Bag

I had some scraps leftover from the quilt. Not much, a bundle of 5-10cm wide and 30-40cm long strips. I was tired one day and felt like sewing so I started to sew them together. After sewing together a few it occurred to me that the strips were just wide enough and there were just enough of them to make a laptop bag. So I did, using the leftover snippets of quilt batting to pad it out and stitching it together with yellow thread.

The reversible-ness gives me two different colour sets the 'red/brown' and the 'blue/green'. With the 'blue' side out the 'red' interior shows

The back of the 'blue side'

The front of the 'blue side'

The front of the 'red' side

Detail

Quilted

So my notion that I could make a quilt was not entirely mis-lead. It did turn out okay! As is my usual fashion for learning a new skill, I decided to tackle something big, rather than small. I washed the fabric back in January but it has taken this long to make the quilt. There were a few problems that had to be solved first:

First of all, I didn't have enough fabric to make the quilt big enough so I had to find another 5-6 co-ordinating squares. Finding non-pastel coloured quilting squares is apparently a big ask.

Second, the quilt batting I first found was really really expensive, so I had to find something cheaper (queue DAISO to the rescue). I got all my fluffy polyester batting for less than $20 bucks. This meant though that my batting was in small 70x80cm squares instead of a big sheet so I had to hand tack all the sheets together so they wouldn't separate when I ran them through the machine. This meant about a day of hand sewing.

Thirdly, I ran out of thread twice (turns out quilting uses a lot of cotton!). So work had to stop to source thread.

Fourthly I didn't have enough gingham for the back so i had to find more. Of course they didn't have any more of the exact same size check or colour, so I had to buy a larger size check in the same colour. So work stopped again.

Fifthly, I worked out why people have special sewing machines with extra long arms and use thicker thread for quilting. This I worked out the hard way trying to wrangle 2 metres of quilt through a very small arm on my machine and having to keep re-thread the needle. So work stopped again and again! And I got very sore arms. Who knew sewing was such hard physical work?

So it was an adventure. Would I do it again? Perhaps. But I might get an over-locker and a long arm machine first.

The sleep test - it sleeps well. Its just warm enough, just wide enough, just soft enough and just comfy enough. In fact, its just right.

I was going to hand tie through all the squares with crochet thread, but I decided against it. Partly because it would take forever, and partly because its actually really comfy as it is and I don't want to be eating thread ends while I sleep.

I love all the colours together too. Such happy cheerful colours. And the Mr. likes it too which always helps (since he is often subject to my textile based experiments and many mono-syllabic weekends when I work on stuff!).

A sneak peek at my new project

I am about to embark on my first quilt. Wish me luck! I've done my planning and scheming and washing. The fabric is Anna-Maria Horner's Good Folks Collection. I love the colour combinations and the prints, they are old-fashioned and modern at the same time. The squares of good folks will be supplemented with some plain squares (to make a king-sized quilt cover) and the back will be some gingham or something suitably random.

I was inspired partly by the beauty of the colours and the fabric, and partly by Denyse Schmidt's quilts. Her book is great and really easy to understand. It makes me think that I can do this! Hopefully this notion is not mis-lead and it shall all turn out well!