Floor Mat

After my successful attempt at making the fan bag, I decided to tackle another one of the projects in Suzuko Koseki's book Patchwork Style: 35 simple projects for a cozy and colorful life -- this time the floor mat.

As I have come to expect from Koseki, the instructions were quite straight forward and left little room for confusion. In fact this mat took me a few hours to complete from start to finish. The most time consuming part was actually deciding how I wanted to arrange the fabric squares onto my linen background. Additionally, I loved that ideally this project could use a lot of my scraps. So I went shopping in my stash and pulled a charm pack of blue and green solids which I then combined with a few of my favorite green and blue prints. I had fun experimenting with different styles of straight line quilting. I think that it really shines, especially on the solids.

I think if I were to do this again I would fray check my fabric squares, or perhaps cut around them with my lovely pinking shears to help reduce the amount of fraying...a lot of my solids frayed quite a bit which was somewhat frustrating to deal with. I also used 2 layers of batting as suggested, but I think next time I will put a towel or something as the batting to make it a little softer.

I love this floor mat and can totally see a few more in my future...the possibilities are endless!

Fall Fan Bag

I made the fan bag from Suzuko Koselki's book Pachwork Style. This is the first bag I've ever made...successfully. I am dying to tackle the infamous weekender bag by Amy Butler, so I figured I'd start with something much simpler first. 

I grabbed a stack of beautiful fabrics from the DS Collections that reminded me of fall and got to work. 

Overall, the bag took me half a day to complete - the hardest part of it, in fact, was finding the leather material for the straps! Luckily, the people at my LQS had a few suggestions and helped me find some material. 

I found Suzuko's instructions very easy to follow and the diagrams were key for a visual learner like myself. My favorite part of the bag is the pockets I created with the scraps that fit the things I carry around with me on a daily basis. Now I don't have to go digging around for a red pen (or 3) when I grade papers.

I am excited that I finished this bag and look forward to bringing it with me to Salt Lake next week...now bring on the weekender!