A bag of sunshine

The glorious weather of the last week had me thinking about Spring rather than Autumn... I felt like getting all Northern-Hemispherical, frolicking in fields of daisies with a gathering basket on my arm, skipping around in swishy romantic clothing, and sitting down to a picnic high-tea. None of which I did, obviously, except for fleetingly, in my head, during a particularly dire episode of Postman Pat.

So instead, I riffled through my fabric cupboard and spied some very Spring-y vintage pillowcases and sheeting, which I proceeded to butcher thusly:

Of course, I started butchering well prior to knowing what I wanted to make with it. I just knew that I wanted to do some patchwork, because, well, it's becoming an obsession, and surely it is the favoured indoors pursuit of breezy, romantic Spring girls?

OK, it's true, I have been gazing far too frequently at THIS picture:

(front cover of Daily Patchwork Goods, a Japanese crafting book I obtained from here)

Now I realised after cutting out and sewing back together a bunch of 4-inch squares that I should have been working in hexagons, because what I really really wanted to make myself was that very basket, the one on the cover, the frolicking-in-fields, dressed-in-flouncy-frock, flower-gathering-basket (perhaps not the actual title, but who knows? It's Japanese, and I wouldn't put it past them!)

So I went ahead anyway, and here's my interpretation:

The instructions for making the bag were all in Japanese, but were fairly easy to interpret visually. Given that I'm usually rather too impatient with patterns anyway, it is my cup of tea to just 'catch the drift' and see what happens. And it happened, and apart from a mostly-salvaged handle diasaster, I'm pretty chuffed with the outcome.

Serendipitously, when I was looking for something sturdy to line the bag with, I came across a denim skirt in my refashioning/mending pile. It had been cast there by my neighbour a year ago, for the unforgiveable sins of being both a daggy length and impossibly small at the waist. But Lo, when I inverted the skirt, the waistband matched the circumference of the bag base perfectly, and then flared out at the same width as the outer bag. So all I had to do was turn the skirt upside-down, lop it off at the appropriate height, add a base, and voila, I had a bag lining! I even left the side-zipper in and turned the bag back through it to right-side-out once I'd finished sewing it together. Ahhhh... slack short-cutting disguised as refashioning. Perfect.

Now I'm using my lovely bag of sunshine to go a-gathering... picking up the scraps of fabric in my house which seem to be multiplying at an alarming rate. Oh well, I guess it's breeding season right, being Spring and all?