I made this little bag from some scraps today. I like it very much. It's so satisfying to make this kind of thing. Very quick and then so very useful, both for its prettiness and also its actual functionality. This whole craft thing is about that, yeah? Being able to create the useful objects around us. I used some left over duck from my dad's bag, and the lining is red stuff left over from the chair seats. The lovely flower print is left over from a soon-to-be revealed project. The button came off of a jacket I have retired. It's actually mostly there just for the photo shoot. I like decorative buttons in theory... but in actual use, the carrying this bag around part, they're a little too frippy.
Me trying to model bag. I always find this kind of shot amusing. Interesting reflection in the beveled edge of the ancient mirror. I think this is my spring bag. Yes, it's black. That's inevitable. But it's sprigged with flowers!
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Another pretty thing from your laboratory. Pretty bags, book covers, quilts, and laptop cozies keep appearing from the basement. Keep on!
ReplyDeleteOkay, but here is my question on bags, and I mean this with all the love in the world: what do you DO with all of them? You make at least one new bag for yourself every season (HEY! Where's MY bag?) but what do you do with the bags that get retired?
ReplyDeleteI have this ongoing bag-guilt. I feel I should be using everything I own, or at least I should be storing it for a specific future use. Obviously I don't live up to my own expectations, but I have this rack of bags that I barely ever use, and it makes me feel sorry for them. Poor bags, empty but for a paperclip and a lonely pack of Splenda at the bottom....
Probably my obvious bag-angst (launched at you, no doubt, in subtle unconscious ways over a period of years) is exactly why you don't make me bags.
My deep and abiding hope is, you take the retired bags to preschool. Lucky you, to have a place to retire every lovely thing! I am going to begin retiring things at WeeWorks, too, if I can manage to remember to.
As a bag-maker myself, you feel less guilty when your own blood, sweat, and sometimes tears, have gone into producing said bag. You just feel proud you made something so darn cute!
ReplyDeleteTrue, true, Steph. And, Lisa, I protest: I have made only three handbags for myself since January of 2008, which means a bag every other season. One of these is still in active rotation. The other had a design flaw involving mouth to depth ratio that resulted in complete obscuration of the contents. It has retired into the Fabric to be Repurposed drawer.
ReplyDeleteYou see, I tend to take the excess apart and re-use. Or delightfully I have a few pillows I have recovered again and again, the layers reaching back to my early adolescence. The pillow now covered with my pixelated cross stitch was last seen in a blue tapestry print I had cut from a skirt I wore in college. Before that embroidered with a picture of Eeyore, and before that it proclaimed "I Love Cory McCall" who was a nice gay boy I knew my freshman year of high school. So, you know, there are good reasons to keep crafting. I wouldn't have that pillow around if it weren't so adaptable.
I actually have the biggest problem with the Fossil purses I buy in Woodburn. There is an overabundance, for sure.