Monday, May 25, 2015

Sisters Sewing Day

*Sorry for the wordiness of this post. The story is one I'm so excited to share, but there's not a lot of pictures. Feel free to scroll down to the bottom of the post to see pictures of the Barbados Bag I made this weekend.

My little sister got jipped when it came to sewing lessons. I'm pretty sure that I was not the best of students (it's possible that I begged for lessons and my mom decided to teach me before I was really ready to learn and ended up breaking her sewing machine) and when my sister was old enough to learn she was battling with some pretty serious health problems. She's had the desire to learn and event knows a little about sewing. Not only that she has quite the stash of fabric from our grandmother and has the machine our mom got when she graduated from high school. I've been dragging her to quilt shops for a while and she's even started buying fabric for that future day when she's learned to sew/quilt.

This weekend we went shopping together and I needed to stop at the LQS to get some interfacing. As I was finding what I needed checking out the new fabrics she started poking around the sample bags that they have. She found the Barbados Bag by Pink Sands Design and asked if I could help her make it. Of course I agreed and we immediately started picking out our fabrics. I wanted to help her make the bag rather than doing it for her so I got fabric to make my own. 

I've tried teaching things to my sister in the past, but since our learning styles are very different it usually ended up in a half finished project and hurt feelings. This time I decided to work one step ahead of her and let her follow the pattern. It worked wonderfully because I had the time to figure out what we were doing. I also let her  follow the pattern and answered questions as she asked them. The only bad thing is that since she was a step behind me the whole time she didn't have her bag finished when it was time for me to leave.  She's got her strap sewn so I think she should be able to do the last steps on her own with phone support as needed.

As promised here's the pictures of my bag!

The back of the bag. (The full shot of the back turned out better than the front.) The blue fabric is divided into two pockets.


On the front of the bag there's a pocket behind the grey pebbly fabric and the blue fabric creates a zippered pocket. The top of the bag is also shut with a zipper. Zippers are still a little scary, especially when step 6 starts with the instructions "Don't be too afraid of this step!"


Thankfully the pattern is very well written with lots of pictures so it was easy to understand. The inside of the bag has two more pockets. I was so excited to find this purple flower fabric. It's the perfect lining and adds this touch of hidden color just for me.


2 comments:

  1. It looks amazing and so nice to share a project with your sister. Precious moments.

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  2. How wonderful that you had some awesome sister time and she was able to learn from you!

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