Sneaky Peeks and a Skinny Stash

You may not know this, but one of my favourite pattern designers, Nikki (Nicole Mallalieu of You Sew, Girl!), has a new book coming out really soon. This will be her second book. Yes, she is THAT good. I did some pattern testing for the book last year, and I am not sure if I am able to show the full, finished bags, but above and below are some sneaky peeks for you (shh!).


The book is called The Better Bag Maker and from the small amount that I have seen, it will be jam-packed full of snazzy tricks to get a great finish to make beautiful hand-made (as opposed to "home-made") bags. It doesn't get released until May, but you can pre-order it now at a lower price from Fishpond* or from Amazon and I am sure, many other great retailers. I will try and remember to come back and show some photos of the full finished bags once the book has been released, if I can tear myself away from it long enough to make a blog post.


To create these wonderful bags, I used at least 12 FQs of fabric. I had to estimate as I didn't keep track, and sometimes fabric can get hidden inside pockets and these bags had plenty of pockets! Since these were made last year, they contribute to the SYST challenge. I also used approximately 3 FQs to make Amélie's Gingham Puppet Show Shorts. In addition to this, I gave away approximately 8 FQs of pale pink fleecy to my mum so she could make some things for my niece. It had been sitting in my stash for a while and I don't really do pastel colours. My friend, Amy (Badskirt) gave me some a metre of crazy fish fabric as well, so that adds 4 FQs back into the stash.



MY FINAL SYST 13 RESULTS!:
in = 144, out = 293, total = -149

In conclusion, I used more than double the fabric to what was added to my collection. My stash is over 35m of fabric thinner than it was 12 months ago. Whilst the totals weren't mega-huge, a lot of rather small things were made. A lot of what was added to my stash was given to me too, so my over-all spend was really quite low. I am really happy with the results, but it might be a while before I pay so much close attention to how much fabric I am using/stashing. I think I would rather just get down to it and sew, sew, sew!

My goal for this year is to sew more things for myself, at least one item a month, which I am keeping to so far, but that is another blog post!