A Bag for Beth

A week before leaving for Vancouver I finished this yarn bag for Beth to keep her stray bits in. I couldn't post it then because it was a surprise, so I took pictures and saved them, waiting for today to write about the project.

Beth has a challenge with things like this as her cat loves to dissect them. Literally. Calvin hasn't met anything he won't try to eat or scratch. I knew, then, from the time I started this project that she'd have to keep it in the closet but she's used to Calvin and shouldn't have a problem. So I took the bag, she's now put all her stray bits of yarn in it and stored it safely away. Every time she looks at the bag she can think about our happy time together last week. Life is good.

The bag itself is my version of a pattern I saw in a beading book. The idea is to have a beaded garden; hence, the dotted Swiss-type fabric on the bottom represents the earth, the blue leaves (from the curtain material in Beth's old bedroom) are close enough to the real thing, and the buttons and beads are obviously the flowers. Siimple, eh? I thought I'd go nuts sewing on all those buttons! This was not beading at all but simply sewing on buttons, over and over. It took me a few days but I kept going because the effect was so pretty.

If you decide to try something like this, use the prettiest shirt-type buttons (no shank) you can find and buy some of that double-sided sticky stuff to put on the leaves and the dotted fabric. I would suggest using a softer fabric for the bag than what I did as sewing on the buttons was tough going through the polyester curtain fabric. I also would suggest putting in a lining behind the pattern panel when you sew the whole thing together to cover up the threads. I used iron-on stuff but would have been happier if I had just enclosed that whole panel so that the stuff inside the bag wouldn't get caught in the threads.

Hopefully you can see that the centers of the flowers are done with beads. You can also bead around the outside of some of the buttons to give an interesting edge, although my fabric was too stiff for that. The pattern I used suggested using an old linen tablecloth but I didn't want to destroy my cloths and didn't have linen anyhow. The wonderful thing about this project is you can just let your imagination run wild. I can see animal shapes for kids' bags, sports stuff--whatever you can dream up. And don't forget to check out those specialty button stores for inspiration.