Picture of a wolf

Before I made the bunny picture, I started another picture at school. It remained unfinished for a long time as we had other, scheduled projects (this was an extra project). It is also based on a picture from a coloring book. I started with the background and by cutting an outline of the head from black fabric.

Then I cut parts of the picture from various scraps of fabric and arranged them on the black outline. I had no glue while making this, so I had to be careful to keep the pieces in their correct places.

When the picture was finished, I covered it with black tulle and stitched straight lines on top of it in 0.5 cm intervals. This was a lot easier than going along the outlines as I did with the bunny. The tulle fabric on top of the picture changes the colors, and the result isn't quite as colorful as before adding it.

The bunny bag

I finished the bag I mentioned in the previous post. It's made of slightly stretchy peach colored fabric with cotton and padding for the lining and the bunny picture on the flap. The picture below shows all the pieces. The structure is mostly the same as in the bag with geometrical patterns I made earlier.

This bag has a lining, and it is made in the same way as in the makeup bag, except the top is open. I first stitched the cotton and padding together close to the edges and then sewed the pieces together, leaving 1 cm seam allowances. The inside pocket was made before stitching the cotton and padding together.

I used velcro for closing as I had no buckles left. The front of the bag has vertical pieces of velcro for adjustment, while the underside of the flap has a long horizontal piece. The order of making the flap is as follows: sew the velcro into the underside piece of the flap, stitch all layers together near the edges, sew bias binding to the side and bottom edges of the flap, and finally sew the flap to the back piece of the bag.

The next step was to sew the front, back and side pieces together to form the outside of the bag. Once that is done, turn the bag right side out and insert the lining.

This is the finished bag. You can either turn the upper edges of the lining outside and stitch the edge or use bias binding for the edge. I had some issues with measurements, and it was easiest to cut the upper edge of the lining along the upper edge of the outside and use bias binding.

The shoulder strap was a bit tricky to sew in place, because of the number of layers of fabric, but my sewing machine was just able to manage it. Any more layers would have been impossible. Like with the first bag, I did not make an adjustable strap, because I haven't been adjusting the strap of the bag I originally used as the model, so that length is just right. Note also that I sewed the strap in place last. Normally it should have been sewn before attaching the lining, but as the outside fabric was stretchy, I wanted to attach the strap also to the non-stretchy lining to help the bag keep its shape.

Here is the outside of the finished bag. There are some errors that are due to the peach fabric being stretchy, but I decided to ignore them. This was basically a prototype, just for testing what the result would be like. And the most important lesson I learned is that using stretchy fabrics for something like this isn't a good idea.

Got inspired by shadow quilting

I read about shadow quilting, and one of the teachers showed some of her work in the similar vein, so I wanted to try something like that. For the first attempt, I took a picture from a coloring book and recreated it using scraps of fabric. I used textile glue to attach the pieces from one or two places to stop them from getting misplaced before the stitching.

After finishing the picture, I covered it with tulle and stitched on top of it to get everything to stay in place and flat. Here you can see also the original picture. When it comes to copyrights, this is fine as long as I'm keeping the resulting picture myself.

This is how the reverse side looks after stitching. Here the whiskers are also in place (they're not in the picture above).

And here is the final picture, whiskers and all.

This was fun to make, and I have already started another one, which will also be a copy of an existing picture. After that, I think I'll start trying to create my own pictures and maybe also try using different kinds of fabrics. It would be nice to get some 3D effect in the pictures as well, so thicker fabrics in some places could be worth experimenting with.