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Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Craft #7: Picnic Bag

I suppose this bag could be used for about a million different things - but given the recent appearance of spring flowers, and the longer warmer days we are experiencing, I've decided it's going to be called a 'picnic bag'.

I've wanted to apply my patchworking skills to different products, and after coming across these beautiful heavy cotton and linen fabrics I purchased at The Makery Emporium in Bath I was inspired to create a patchwork picnic bag.

The project represents a few crafts on my 'to-do' list.

1. trying out a kaleidoscope quilt block - (I'm amazed at the patterns you can create with different use of colours)
2. I wanted to adapt this 'how to draft a pattern' tutorial for a small zippered purse into a larger project

Using graph paper, I drafted a pattern for a bag made up for 4" kaleidoscope blocks... the faces of the bag are made up of a 12 blocks in a 4 by 3 rectangle, the bottom covered in plain cotton canvas, and the sides made up of more 4" blocks.

I basically just enlarged the pattern using straight edges instead of angled sides, and followed the tutorial leaving out the zipper attaching some straps into the seam between the exterior and the lining. Oh yeah, and rather than piece all my blocks together as a whole, I quilted them onto a layer of wadding to give the bag more strength and stability.

I'm pretty happy with the results... what do you think? If there is sufficient interest from my readers, I'll post again this week with a more straightforward tutorial.


The bag will be going up for auction as a part of my 52 weeks: 52 craft challenge, and 100% of the sale price will go to Macmillan Cancer Support.

If you think this would be great for your picnic plans, or you can give it a home as a knitting bag, a shopping bag, a beach bag, etc why not bid for it and support a great cause? The auction details will appear below once it's listed.

1 comment:

  1. That is so lovely, what a lot of painstaking work and how kind of you to donate the proceeds to charity x

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