MySewingCircle.com

I signed up for MySewingCircle.com yesterday. It's a site for sewers that is based on Ravelry. It is still a bit barebones (in particular, the forums need more work and groups would be nice), but so far, so good. It was quite buggy in Firefox (in particulr the date on the projects) but works fine in Chrome.

My username on there is twolemons.

Birthday Birdies

I made this tote bag for my friend Req's birthday gift a few weeks ago. I used some lovely love bird cotton I picked up last fall and made it per my usual tote formula: muslin lining, a deep box shape -- I'm not sure the proper name of the technique and my Googlefu is failing me, but you can find the corners explained in this tutorial. It basically makes the bag three-dimensional rather than just lying flat, and I find it makes a roomier bag. There is also a little pocket inside, made of the bird fabric.

The cotton is very thin, so I added some fusible interfacing to the straps for strength. I only had the lightest interfacing possible -- bought to practive making appliqués -- but it worked well enough. You can see that I added a double line of stitching to each side of the straps. And of course the finishing touch is the decorative stitch around the top of the bag.

I filled the bag with a lovely, sunny bunch of flowers and it made a nice gift!