As promised...

......sort of.

Some days I'm such a forgetful Jones.  It's truly an act of God that I even get myself out of the house.  With clothes on.  Gifts in their bags.  Required food prepared.  But today....ah today something completely new happened to me.  I forgot to brush my TEETH!  Egad.  And do you think I had a breath mint in my purse to save me?  Oh, no.  Not even a Halls cherry cough drop to bail me out.  Plus I forgot my camera, which I was supposed to use to take a picture of my finished Chicken bag as proof that I actually do complete things.

Ok, so it was right up to the minute.  Nevermind, yes I was actually late getting out of the house.  No valid excuse, although the stupid bobbin thread ran out, as it always does when you're in a rush, with only 3 inches to go.  Don't you just hate it when you're sewing merrily along, only to discover that your bobbin ran out about 8 inches ago? &*#%@*?!  I simply begged for divine intervention to get me through it.  I kept saying to myself, 'I can do this, I can do this'.

And so I did.  Unfortunately I'm going to have to rely on my good friend Joyce to send me the pictures of the front and back of the finished bag.  Why Joyce? you ask.  Well, that would be because Joyce was fortunate enough to get my bag in our exchange today.  So many talented people in our group.  I got a lovely quilted tote in shades of green with black (thank you Pat!).  Our luncheon was filled with wonderful appetizers, desserts, and an out of this world punch that was aided by a bit (read: bottle) of Jim Beam.  Whooohooo!

I am so lucky to have such wonderful friends.  Friends are there when times are great and not so good, too.  You would have to go a long way to find such a great group -- we are all different but share a common love for each other.  I am truly blessed.

With that, I'll pass along a few of the prep pictures for the Chicken bag I made.

I used a drawing from a book on free art for craft people:

 

I had to enlarge it to about 200% to get it to be the size I needed for the front of the bag.  I labeled the pieces so that when I cut it apart I could at least figure out where everything went.  

I used some wacky scissors from Home Depot that had a laser on them to cut the background for the chicken.

Using the colors from the hand-dyed wool that I used to piece the back of the bag (this is where Joyce's pictures come in....) --

-- I chose hand-dyed roving to do a needle felted design of the chicken.  I struggled all day yesterday with this concept.  I really wanted to use the leftover pieces of hand-dyed wool to applique the chicken but I kept waffling so I went with the needle felted technique.

I used a blanket stitch on my Bernina Activa 240 sewing machine to apply the chicken to the wool bag fabric.

I finished sewing the bag together last night and made the lining from a yellow cotton I had set aside for a chicken quilt (some day....).  This morning I cut a piece of needlepoint canvas to fit and using a set of purse feet, placed it neatly on the inside of the bottom of the bag.  Next I made the cell phone/pen pocket and sewed it to the lining.  The last steps were to make the tabs for the purse handles and sew it all together:  lining, bag and handle tabs.  Phew.  Now if I hadn't run out of bobbin thread I might have uttered  fewer cuss words, so let's just blame it on the bobbin.

Once I got home from our gathering I had the house to clean up.  When I sew in a mad rush I tend to leave all the evidence behind.  Plus I had made a hot dip to take for the party and the skillet was still on the stove where I left it.  No, Kevin did NOT clean it for me.  Nevermind that he cleans dishes for a living and could have found a minute to take care of it for me.

So if Joyce can help me out by emailing me a couple of pictures of her bag, I will post them when I can.

I'm off to get in a bit of knitting before calling it an early night.  Hope everyone has a great week!  Safe travels to everyone heading somewhere for the holidays.