My Schlep Bag

This week I've done a lot of prewashing of lovely fabrics that are mostly all different shades of blues for my Blue Ridge Beauty, or Buckeye Beauty. I need 448 blue and neutral 4-patches and 448 blue and neutral Half Square Triangles. Whew! For me that's a tall order because I work like a snail, dawdling along, just enjoying myself. I've also poked along on the Cheddar Challenge and I'm up to 44 of those cute lil' bow tie blocks.

So today I jumped in and made the second in a pair of matching Schlep Bags.http://tinyurl.com/yjqom44 I did the first one yesterday and it took me all day to complete one. Then today, I made the next one in about an hour and a half. It was all cut out and all the instructions were nice and fresh in my mind, so it flew together!

In the picture, it looks like there is something growing out of the bottom of the bag. That is actually a nice 2 yard piece of indigo that is sitting on my design-wall chair. You can just make out the white selvedge on it. I hope to use that for the borders on my Blue Ridge Beauty if it's not too dark. Geez, it looks black here. hmm.

Anyway, I'm thrilled with the schlep bags and here is a close up of the fabrics that I used. These are not quilted bags, but they are lined and have a very strong, batting reinforced and quilted set of handles. The set will be a birthday present for my sister, Suzanne in September.

The focus fabric, the light one, is a teal and lavender floral on a very pale creamy yellow background by Sarah Morgan for Blue Hills fabrics. It is called, "Charlotte," and I just ordered it a few days ago from Thousands of Bolts.com. But the other fabrics are all from WalMart and have been in my stash for months or maybe years!

Since this pattern uses four 8-inch squares of three fabrics and a couple of 8 1/2-inch squares of the top triangles and the handles fabric, it really moves out the stash! I used a pale yellow print tone-on-tone for the lining. I pieced the whole thing with a light warm gray Aurafil thread which looked great on the quilting of the handles and on the top-stitching on the upper edge.

The other boring thing that I did today, was to fill out all the paperwork to enter my FOUR (OMG, me? four?) large bed quilts in the Belknap Mill Quilter's Guild show October 1st & 2nd. So I need to do labels and sleeves, too. everything takes me twice as long to DO as it does to think of it! LOL! I guess that just goes without sayin', right?