bag progress

For this morning's class some of the other ladies had their fabric already cut out and were able to start sewing right away.  

 I wasn't one of those.  Being out of commission the past several days because of my back I felt lucky to make it to class with a pattern, fabric, and my machine.  (Thank you, Melissa, for carrying my machine in for me!)  

Because I'd thought the Yin-Yang pattern looked easier to make I had decided on that one.  

Pati said it was actually the more difficult of the two... in fact she'd made one once, and said she will never make one again.  That decided it for me - I ran home and picked up the Deli Tote pattern!

Naturally it took a while to cut out the various pieces - here's the happy ladybug fabric I chose for my focus fabric.

I did make one mistake cutting out my pieces (hope you didn't hear that nasty word I let slip) and also had to cut out the Pellon and fuse it to the various pieces so it wasn't until 11:00 that I was actually ready to sew my first stitch.  

Here are the front and back pieces (some of the black is actually the bottom of the bag, so not as much will actually show.)

And instead of ties, it's going to have a velcro-closing tab across the top:

Now I'm just going to put it aside for a couple of weeks until I'm back at the Bee Hive and Pati can help with the next steps.  

In the meantime I'll get going on the I SPY quilt I've offered to make for Park Meadows for their Fall Festival raffle.  Nothing very fancy - just sets of matching 6" blocks for the kids to find.  Thanks to the ladies who have already answered my pleas for fun fabric donations.

Here's a colorful I SPY that Linda Hynick made that got a lot of us interested in making one of our own.