fit for travel

After making a cushion cover and a pencil case from leftover crazy rails quilt blocks, I decided to use up the hexagons that I had left over from my hexagon quilt. I don't have a wash bag and when I travel, I just shove things in Annie's old nursery gym bag, which is sweet but doesn't close and stuff falls out. I am quite low maintenance when it comes to body care, I don't need a big wash bag to fit it all, which is just as well because I didn't have that many hexagons left. I could have made more but that completely defeats the purpose of using up the last bits and pieces used for a bigger project.

Hand-stitching the hexagons into two rectangles was a happy activity that reminded me how much I loved making my hexagon quilt. I ironed fusible interfacing on the back to give it a bit of stability and then I quilted the fabric rectangles using diagonal lines. I am not sure if this is essential but it is quite satisfying to sew neat straight lines.

To line my wash bag, I chose a denim fabric and a bright pink zip because that's what I had. I also made two inside pockets, one with small remnant of a mildly psychedelic fabric, the other with a jeans pocket from Annie's favourite jeans when she was a little girl. These were raspberry red and I would love to own a pair of jeans like hers. The jeans pockets have been used as knee patches many times on all children's jeans and in fact, the second one is still on Alistair's jeans. I don't imagine I'll be needing many more knee patches and thought is was ok to repurpose at least one of them. Jeans pockets are so useful, I like to remove them from jeans that have no live left in them.

My fingers were stained blue when I handled the denim fabric. A reminder to pre-wash fabric... only by the time I noticed my blue fingers, the bag was finished. I'll have to test if the colour runs with a small piece of leftover denim before I wash this little wash bag.

Taking photos of the wash bag was the hardest part of the project. Or maybe that was turning out the zipper tabs. In hindsight, I should have cut them a bit longer but I didn't want to compromise on the zip length, at the off I decide to take my electric toothbrush away.

There was quite a lot of denim fabric left, which I used to make a new cover for one of our floor cushions. They get a lot of use by dogs, cats and people and need replacing every now and then. The cushion cover is a simple fold-over cover, nothing fancy at all.

Another quick make, how satisfying.

Apologies for the rubbish photos, wash bags are not the most cooperative models and the lighting is still wintery...

Thanks for stopping by and saying hello. It is lovely to see you visit. x