Friday, October 31, 2025

Bowl Me Over 2.0 - Island Batik Ambassador Sew Stylish Bag Challenge

 


The month of October has been all about bags for Island Batik Ambassadors! And today I am ready to show off my bag!  I made the Bowl Me Over bag with pattern from ByAnnie.com











For this challenge, Ambassadors got to pick the fabrics we wanted to play with and I was loving the pink and green in the Everlasting fabric line by Jerry Khiev of Lumin Fabrics

I chose this pink and green sprig print for the main body, the green and pink burst print for the lining, and a bright green for the coordinating handles and binding.







ByAnnie also provided us with the hardware and other items needed to create the bag. The soft and stable is perfect to create nice sturdy bags that stand up on their own. and the hardware, mesh and zippers matched the fabrics perfectly.






I love the by Annie patterns and the add on videos. Everything is written well and organized in a way that makes putting the bag together easy and the Ad On videos are a nice help when you just want to see some how certain parts are done,  I have made several bags from ByAnnie as an ambassador and some on my own. I just love her patterns and how all the bags turn out so fancy.





They all do seem to have one thing in coming though and that is the last part when you add the binding to cover up all the raw edges. That part is always fiddley with all the seams coming together, but if you take it slow it mentally prepare your self for some thick seams then it's easier to manage.  With all the practice I've had with her patterns I am getting pretty good at it.





and a universal 90/14 Schemtz Needle handled all the layers without any problems.






Sometimes you have to bend the bag around a lot to get the binding parts to fit under the machine, but my Mini Oliso helped press out the wrinkles.




This bag has lots of pockets which i love!  A magnetic flap pocket on the front,




And a full size zippered pocket on the back.




As well as pockets on both sides on the inside.  I really love the mesh pockets.  It helps keep things organized yet I can still see what is in the bag.

I'm loving the pink bursts on the green fabric when I opened the bag. 




The pattern lets you choose between short or long handles.  I opted for the short handles for quick grabbing and added the additional carrying strap to carry it over the shoulder as well.




My daughter is having her first baby this December and she loves pink.  I thought this bag would be the perfect size for a few baby things. It can be backed and ready to go for quick outings.  She is going to love it!   I love it too, so much so that I might make another one for myself!





Happy Sewing!



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Posted by at 10:11 AM 0 comments

Monday, October 27, 2025

Berry Crush - Blog Hop





When Jennifer of Curlicue Creations asked me  to help show off her Island Batik signature fabric collection, Berry Crush, by Lumin Fabrics, designed by Jerry Khiev, I couldn't say no!






These colors are so lush and fruity! I had a good time playing around with them!








Jennifer graciously sent me a 1/4 yard cut of each print and Lumin Fabrics supplied the neutral batiks.





I played around with several economy block sizes and created this fun quilt.




It's 12 blocks with cornerstones and sashing.




I have been using a lot of white lately for my backgrounds, so I decided to shake things up and use several different Island Batik Neutrals. I tried to pick a few that had some purple or blue tints in them.





Most of the quilt was pieced traditionally, but I did paper piece the sashing blocks. It helped me get perfect tiny borders around the economy block. I love that little strip!




Of course Boonky was on the job.




The sashing units took the most time. Over 6 hours just to make them all.




After that everything went together smoothly. 




I quilted it with swirls and wiggly lines. 
I did these a little tighter than my last quilt.




The quilt top finished at 44 1/2 wide. So I added a skinny pink strip to this older Island Batik print for the backing. 

I also added a white square for a space to write my name and year. A built in label.





I'm calling this one Tilted Berries.





Today is the last day of the hop, 
Be sure to go back and check out any of the ones you may have missed!

And look for Berry Crush in quilt shops now!


October 20:  Curlicue Creations
October 21:  Slice of Pi Quilts
October 22:  The Darling Dogwood
October 23:  Lisa's Quilting Passion
October 24:  I Heard it through the Quilt Vine
October 25:  Forever Quilting 4 You
October 26:  Textile Time Travels
October 27:  Quilted Delights



Happy Sewing!


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Posted by at 12:02 AM 4 comments

Wednesday, October 22, 2025

Out of the Dark Halloween Blog Hop



Welcome to day three of the Out of the Dark Blog Hop!   Hosted by Joan of Moose Stash Quilting.  I am so glad Joan is hosting this hop again this year.  It has been one of my favorite hops over the years! 

I love playing with Halloween fabrics and colors!
This year I decided to play around with just the colors and made festive table runner.







I started out by picking out some spooky colors and made some traditional quilt blocks.
These are Island Batik fabrics and all but the black came from stash builder sets that were sent to me as part of the Island Batik Ambassador program.

Each stash builder set has five rolls of four strips each. The strips are five inch by the width of the fabric and you can make quite a bit from them.  I made all the blocks with them and still had some leftovers. The black is another Island Batik print I had in my personal stash.

I even cut the fabrics too small for my first sawtooth star block and still had enough fabric for all my blocks and then some.  I redid the Sawtooth block the right size and will find something to do with that smaller block later on.





I wanted to stich in the ditch for the quilting and since this was a small project I decided to use my regular machine.  I am still better at ditch quilting on my regular machine compared to my long arm.  I have to use the rulers to keep it straight on the long arm, but I don't have to on the regular machine and it's actually faster for me.

I had perfect size scrap of Hobbs Fusible batting so I didn't have to pin baste anything.





As usual, Boonky was on duty for quality control.




I put it on the table with my newest Halloween decoration, but I felt it was missing something...




That's better.  




Caldrons over flowing with candy!  The perfect Halloween table decoration!

It's been a fun hop so far!  Be sure to check out any that you may have missed Monday or Tuesday, and check out the other blogs today to see their spooky creations.


Monday Oct 20


Happy Sewing!


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Posted by at 12:02 AM 16 comments

Thursday, October 9, 2025

TGIFF - A Flying Color Finish!



Welcome! Today I am hosting this week's TGIFF - Thank Goodness It's Finished Friday! 









TGIFF is all about sharing finishes and today I want to show off my Flying Colors quilt!
It is a Cozy Pattern Original.





This project started out as a kit I won in January 2011 when Quilting Blogs were all the rage and Give-Aways were happening right and left.  I just happened to get lucky and I won a kit to make a Flying Colors quilt!





When I got it in the mail, I was super excited, but I'll admit I was a little intimidated to start it, as it looked really complicated.  So I kept putting it off and it sat in the shelf for years.

Since all the fabrics were picked and the pattern was tucked in with them, to me, it officially became a UFO.  It was actually one of my oldest, I have four more on my list that are older, but I will get to those another time. 





Last month, when I decided to spend a good chunk of time cutting out projects, this one made the cut.  I ended up cutting out five projects and got them ready to sew, which I compared similar to meal prep: getting everything ready in advance so when your short on time or energy you can grab a meal prepped kit and start cooking it, or in this case, just start sewing.  I made a quick YouTube video about quilt "meal" prepping along with some tips, which you can check out here:




A few weeks after I cut everything out, I finished up a UFO and needed another one to work on. In January of this year, I challenged myself to sew at least fifteen minutes a day on my UFOs and so far I have done pretty good.  I have missed a few days here and there, but I always jump back on and have done pretty good at knocking out a few UFOs and some of them were pretty big projects. 

So with another UFO complete, I let the Random Number Generator picked the next UFO to work on and it chose this one, Flying Colors!




With all the cutting done it was easy to jump right into the sewing. And after a few weeks, it was finally finished.  If you are interested, I've been updating my weekly UFO progress each Wednesday with quick three to four minute videos on YouTube. I've grouped them all together in one play list, but if you only want to see how I worked on this this quilt, you can start with Episode 38.  




I'll show off this finish in my next video update on Wednesday (Episode 41) and I'll pick out a new UFO from my list to work on. But as part of TGIFF, you all get to see the finish first!





Honestly, the quilt came together way easier than I thought it would. Once I got everything cut out, I realized it really wasn’t intimidating at all. It was fun to put together and came together pretty quickly, even with me mostly working on it in 15-minute chunks.



So what have you all been working on?  Do you have a recent finish to share? If so add your link to the link party below and spread the word! 

 Be sure to tour all the other finishes and share the comment love!  You never know what link could inspire your next finish!

To catch everyone's Friday, the link party is open from Oct 9 at 6pm to Oct 11 at 11:59.


You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter



Happy Sewing!


=^..^=



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Posted by at 6:00 PM 3 comments
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