Zippered Pouch Swap

We decided to conduct a zippered pouch swap within the Boston Modern Quilt Guild, which we conducted at our November meeting. I love making zippered pouches and thought this would be a fun, easy swap that didn't require a ton of time for our members. While I've made a ton of zippered pouches, I never made a boxed pouch. I decided this was the perfect opportunity to make one.

I used the Boxy Bag pattern by Kelby Sews. This really came together quick and easily. The most difficult part was when I went ahead and trimmed my plastic zipper and then unzipped the pouch to iron it. Well, I forgot to tack the end of the now-trimmed zipper and the zipper came right off the teeth and into my hand. It took me a good 15 minutes to get it back on. Once I did, it was smooth sailing from there. You can bet I won't be doing that one again.

This fabric is an Art Gallery fabric that I got in a fat quarter bundle a year or two ago with the coordinating yellow print. The zipper is from Zip It. I used three layers of 101 Pellon interfacing for this. Two pieces on the outer fabric and one on the liner. The pouch is stiff enough to stand on its own but flexible enough to allow the new owner to manipulate it as she wishes. 

A Few Zippered Pouches

I've been itching to sew lately, but with my travel schedule the way it has been, that hasn't been easy. In order to finally have a finish behind my belt, I decided to make a few wide open pouches (the medium size). I feel like I'm past the wedding stage of my live and have moved onto the baby stage where instead of going to weddings every month, I'm going to baby showers instead. So having a few of these on hand for gifts will be good, especially since I won't have the time to make quilts for all of them even though I'd like to.

I love making these pouches because it's a great way to dig into my stash and use up some of those novelty prints or fabrics I'm not quite sure what to do with anymore. Sometimes they just make the perfect pouch or bag.

Now to dig into a quilt or two! 

Retreat 2015

Last weekend I attended the annual Boston MQG retreat up in Kennebunkport, ME. This was my fourth time attending retreat and I can honestly say I always have an amazing time with the wonderful ladies of our guild. I think we have a pretty awesome guild with a wide range of skills and aesthetics, which is always so inspiring.

My first order of business was finishing up my Prism Dust quilt top. I arrived with 33 out of the 36 blocks made. I finished the three blocks and got to work on piecing the top together. Because these blocks were paper pieced, I kept the paper on, but it becomes very heavy as you're piecing along. The benefit of keeping the paper on while piecing everything together is that you have less distortion because of all the bias and accuracy is improved.

Piecing the top took a lot more time than I thought it would. All together, I've definitely spent over 100 hours piecing this top, which I began last summer. Given my schedule, I've spent a few hours here and there on this quilt when I had the time.

My other finish for the weekend was this zippered pouch for our zipit challenge. ZipIt kindly provided a 14" navy zipper for us all to make a zippered pouch. I've wanted to use these cotton and steel arrows for the bottom of a bag for some time. I thought this was the perfect opportunity. I freehanded a flying goose pattern on some paper to paper piece for the top part and offset it. I was really happy with the result and blown away that I actually won the challenge. I can honestly say I wasn't expecting to win because there were so many awesome pouches. We have some seriously talented quilters in our guild, so I was honored to win.

I did work on a few other projects here and there that I didn't finish. One was a leaders and enders project with equilateral triangles. One was a quilt that I can't speak of. Not because it's secret, but because the pattern was such a PITA and poorly written that I had to put it aside I was so frustrated. I think I'm going to figure out how to paper piece the pattern instead. I don't have pictures of those yet, but stay tuned!