Vintage buttons

Lucky me! my mother came to visit and she brought with her all my gran mother's old buttons!! She even separated them in bags per colours or material.. There are a few that are true antiques, made with baqulite! (bakelita) - some shapes and colours are unreal. Also, some have 6 holes?!

I feel so lucky!!

New resolution: I'm gonna make shopping bags as gifts

Everyone is on the trend of using tote bags to avoid discarding more plastic bags into the environment. This is just great and I think is a great excuse to make bags for a great cause. So, my first recipient was my friend Marwan, whose birthday I missed whilst being in Spain.

Is a serious bag, discreet and not on-your-face. I had to find a way to make a bag masculine enough but still interesting. Hopefully I got it right...

Once I finished it, I packed it into a piece of fabric, Japanese style.

Few things I've done last week

I've been pretty inspired and made a few quick projects. They all took me just a night (less than an hour per project perhaps). These are the results:

1 sausage-scarf
1 orange bag
1 red wine bag

Made with less than one skein (less than half perhaps?) with very big needles, in soft wool that I had left over from another project. And a few interesting silk yarns (for the ribbons), all I did is knit and reduce drastically every number of rows for the sausage effect. Then embellish with buttons for a girly effect. Could look quite fun in bright colours, making each "sausage" in a different colour, for kids :-)

And the bags

I'm so proud of these - I really enjoy making bags (which reminds me I must post a pic of my first bag, which I started in our first group session - stripes and dots, remember?). They are made with felt and inherited thai fabric that Mari gave me.

(click to see all steps to make this bag, easy and quick,
thanks to this easy pattern from Colorfull)
(forgot to add this pic, essential!! the bottom to keep the tote standing up - and give it more room and shape. Once you finish sewing it, is good to iron it to give it sharpness)

After making the orange small tote I thought 1/ is too bright and 2/ is bit small for my friend Mayo. So I went and made another one... which I plan to embellish with a flower brooch that she can put on or take off in the bag when she wants to use it on her jackets

Detail where you can see the "handmade" touch. The pictures don't reproduce properly the colour of the felt and the contrast with the apple green thread :-(
Is more like a bourgoundy red, warm and heavy.