Hot Off the Sewing Machine

Yes, you're right. I've been absent lately.

My brain is overloaded with the anticipation of changes—job changes, money changes, life changes. (Relax, no changes re family or Significant Other.) As things settle down and become clearer, I'll tell you more. But as I'm weighing and balancing and considering all these changes, I haven't had much to say in this public forum.

So I'll share what's been going on in my sewing room.

My 84yo house shares many features with other houses of its vintage. One of these is an incinerator in the basement, in the room I have chosen to be my sewing room. The incinerator was vented out the basement wall. When I got my lovely new water heater six weeks ago, we asked the brilliant HandymanTom to seal off that vent in preparation for removing the incinerator. Two weeks ago I spent several hours moving the incinerator out of the sewing room and cleaning up 84 years of soot and dust and crud that had accumulated around it. Once I could see the floor again, I moved fabric containers into that space and made more room/less clutter.

I'm far from having a space that makes sense and fosters creativity, but I feel great encouragement about the space after all this work.

The first product of the new space is a bag for tomorrow night's gala benefiting the Montessori School of the Mahoning Valley. The bag will be offered in their "Chinese auction" and is, I believe, the nicest of these mesh bags I've ever made.

Instead of leaving the mesh showing on the outside, I have completely enclosed it. So you get a bag that looks like it's just crafted of beautiful, high-quality cottons, but that has the durability and stability of the vinyl-coated polyester mesh.




The main fabric is an African print in amber, burgundy, rust, green and teal. I bought the fabric at G Street Fabrics in 1996 to make a quilt for the third-floor guest room in my Washington home. I have several coordinating teal prints that I used to accent the main fabric. The bag front features an iPhone-sized pocket and an antique mother-of-pearl carved button. (Click on the pics to see a larger version.)




There's an interior zippered pocket that's padded with quilt batting, so it feels much more substantial than a single layer of cotton fabric. The zipper pull? African beads that I got at the Tucson Gem & Mineral Show about 8 years ago. They've been sitting in my bead stash, waiting for just such an opportunity as this. They're wire-wrapped with a sterling headpin onto a sterling clasp, hooked to the zipper pull.

The bag has been treated with Scotchgard™ to resist stains. The 18" handles are comfortable to hold, or will easily slip over one's shoulder for carrying. The bag folds flat to tuck in the bottom of a suitcase.

Yes, I am proud of my work! I'm hopeful that the bag's beauty will cause people to spend more on raffle tickets than they had planned, thus bringing in more money for our beloved Montessori School of the Mahoning Valley.