May Project: Treasure Bag

Thank you so much for the sweet words regarding my entry for Blogger's Quilt Festival. There were so many wonderful entries, and I haven't had the chance to check them all out yet (or reply to all of your comments). I'm planning on making some time this weekend to sit and enjoy the wonderful entries.

In the meantime, I wanted to post my completed May project: the Treasure Bag from Amanda Soule's Handmade Home. Although I really want to make nearly every project featured in the book, I finally settled on this one for two reasons. First, my little guy LOVES a good bag to tote around his stuff. And secondly, he seems to collect an awful lot of stuff on our walks. So I figured this would be a great addition to his bag collection, one that we could bring with us as we explored outdoors.

I did not use window screening mesh as she did in her book. Instead, I used some black tule fabric that I got from the remant section at JoAnn's. Though it works great, I must confess I did not at all enjoy working with it. It's too slippery and hard to line up, for my taste. I'm glad I made 3 at once, assembly line style, because I don't think I'm in any rush to go back to working with tule.

I was planning on using a fun nature-inspired print for the front decorative panel of the bag, but the Monkey selected this truck fabric instead. I used some double fold bias tape I had left over from another project, and the handles are made of this nice, soft, cotton twill tape that was part of the packaging of some paper flowers I bought a few years back.

It turns out the Monkey is not so interested in using this bag for collecting his nature treasures, and instead wants it to tote around his cars and trucks and books (about cars and trucks, of course). I'm hoping that as the weather warms (and dries!) up around here, and we start spending more time in our garden and by the water, that will change. But even if it doesn't, it's still being used and loved all over town. And since his favorite things in the world right now are his cars and trucks and books (about cars and trucks, of course), I guess the "treasures" label is right on.