Done. AND packed.

Yay me! My overnight bag that I’ve been working on is done. The silver lining of having sick small people, is I’ve managed to squeeze in more sewing time than I normally would be able to, and yesterday, just in time to start dinner, this little beauty was DONE. I am so happy with how it came out. There were a couple of moments of “oh crap” where things wouldn’t line up (say, the lining being far too big for the main bag), but that was mainly due to my errors, ie, not reading the instructions (yeah, right back in STEP ONE where it says to trim the lining). But it got fixed, and finished and I’m chuffed.

I made a couple of small adjustments from the pattern:

– the pockets rotated 90 degrees (due to not paying attention to fabric direction when cutting, but I prefer wide shallow pockets to narrow deep anyway)

– instead of using the 4 peices of grey to make two pockets, I cut equal sized pieces of the lining fabric and made four pockets. Shame to hide all that pretty fabric inside a pocket! This gave me two pockets on each side, I left the pockets on the back unflapped.

– I cut square flaps instead of rounded, and sewed with side seams instead of binding

– instead of buying bias binding for the ring loops, I cut strips from the same navy fabrics as the pocket flaps 1″ wide.

– I used D rings instead of circular rings (mainly because that’s all my LQS had)

– I didn’t add feet

– I used 2 8×10″ plastic cutouts from the bottom of green shopping bags instead of 9×20″ piece of template plastic (tightwad alert!)

I’m especially pleased with the way the quilting on the main bag came out. It was all done freehand in a similar style to the print on the grey fabric. Not a bad attempt, I didn’t think!

And, to add to my pats on the back, I have even got it almost completely packed. With a whole two weeks to go. Plenty of time!

The lurgies are slowly fading away, and thus so is my crafting time. I’ve been running round madly cleaning this morning in between feeding the small people, giving cuddles and playing shops. Both Boy2 and Butterfly are happily dozing, so I’m calling it mummy rest time as well, and about to pop on a movie and do some crochet – the AJ dragon is in my sights and then a couple of rows of ripple. Probably should hang some washing while the sun is out too… but then I’d have to fold it, and I’ve only just caught up. Boy2’s orange quilt is so close to done, I’d love to get the last borders on it so I can sandwich over the weekend, I’m thinking it’ll be a good addition to his birthday present haul in a month or so. But first. I have a hot date with Emma and a crochet hook. Hooray for Friday, have a great weekend!

{oh, and how could I forget? AJ’s SYST update. This was all stash, so starting with my -12FQs, I then used around 3 metres of fabric for this, for a total YTD stash bust of -24FQs.}