Hi ya'll! I hope you had a nice Memorial Day weekend. We went fishing with a friend and I had the pleasure of catching a nice size Red Drum! I have also been doing some more sewing with the coffee bean bags. I think I have a new obsession! My daughter is taking her first cruise and asked for a backpack to carry around necessities and take when they go out sightseeing. I made her a backpack that will be perfect for that. Yesterday while hubby bbq'd and painted the deck I made this bag from two different bean bags and I love the way it turned out. It's going in my Etsy shop as soon as I'm done here. It has 4 large, deep front pockets, interior pockets, and the recycled curtain rings just complete the recycled/upcycled look. Here's some pics of my work.

A lot of pieces go into this bag and have to be handcut because of the curves and irregular shapes. Then there's the interfacing, fusible fleece, and the brown fabric sewn to the back of the burlap pieces which of course aren't seen but help make this a great and sturdy bag.

Here's the backpack!

Hope you have a lovely day. Remember...don't just look at things for what they are, look at them for what they COULD be. Blessings, Gina

A busy and wonderful Mothers Day weekend!

 Hi ya'll! I hope you had a nice weekend with your family, Mother, or whoever you were with. Work brought my son John from Chicago for a few days so I got to have lunch with him, see my son Joe who was working a few doors down for a brief time, and my daughter Anna had the weekend off so she joined us for lunch and for me and hubby to take Mom to dinner Friday night. My oldest Jim, daughter in law Becky, and baby Josh live in Virginia. Chris and I did some boating out on Black Creek on Saturday then took a ride to lovely St. Augustine yesterday for dinner. In between all that, my husband went to work on Thursday and told the guys about the upcycled coffee bean sack purse I made and a guy ordered two after seeing a pic. One for his Mom and one for his wife. These bags have a lot of pieces to cut and except for the straps on the tote, they all have to be hand cut. The burlap pieces need a brown backing, then fusible fleece on top of that. I have to pin cautiously as burlap is fragile and I take extra steps for the edges of the burlap during cutting and assembly to prevent fraying. Here's the pieces for the large bag!

Since I don't know these women, their style or favorite colors, I played it safe and got a beautiful floral home décor fabric with pinkish/red, blue, yellow and green. It looks so pretty with the burlap!

And here's a few Mothers Day weekend pics!

I may be making a few of these upcycled eco-friendly bags and listing them on Etsy as well as my FB page, but with the labor intensive projects they are, several hours, I'd prefer to do custom orders. Feel free to contact me on my page (link on my blog). The tote style bags are 65 and the large purse is 80. The large one has interior pockets and two large outer pockets in front, and the tote has interior pockets and side pockets under the bows. I'll be happy to try to accommodate color preferences! Have a lovely week. Blessings! Gina

Free Pattern link for an upcycled/recycled handbag

Hi ya'll! Hope you enjoyed your weekend because we sure did! We drove to Fernandina on Friday to enjoy the Annual Shrimp Festival. Good food, live music, crafters from all over the U.S. and all the lovely boutiques that line the street make for a great time. Here we are by the Pirate Ship

On Saturday we went to downtown Jacksonville for World of Nations for more yummy food, crafts from all over the world, cultural dances and music. We had an amazing service at church Sunday and saw I don't even know how many people get baptized!

While at the Shrimp Festival we were walking around when I spotted a guy selling burlap sacks. I've always wanted to take a sack with cool graphics and words and make a bag from it. I found a blog by this amazing lady who uses potato sacks for some of her bags and picked one of the free patterns she shared and spent literally all day yesterday sewing this bag.

Since I was using burlap I had a few things I knew I needed to do. I couldn't treat the burlap like cotton or home décor fabric and if I ironed the fusible fleece to the back of the burlap the white would show through. So I cut my pieces for the front and back exterior pieces a little larger than needed.

I then took rust colored fabric cut out in the pattern piece, and sewed it to the back of the burlap, then cut the burlap out according to the pattern piece.

The piece for my exterior back had a few small holes, as all coffee bean bags will, so I made square patches, zig zagged them to the back behind the holes, then applied fray check and set it aside to dry.

I cut out all the other pieces for the bag, and there are a lot of em!

I applied the fusible fleece to the back of my exterior pieces which is also backed by the rust fabric and proceeded from there. I have always loved a recycled or upcycled project! Who knew a 3.00 coffee bean bag could make such a cute purse?! I used scrap fusible fleece that I almost previously threw away which turned out to be barely enough, but enough. I used left over home décor fabric from another project. I love the 3 compartment interior pockets and the side pockets with the bows.

I'm not sure exactly what I'm going to make with the rest of these but I think I see some totes and other purses in my near future. You can check my fb page and Etsy shop over the next week or two, or if you're a maker, here's where I found the pattern.     http://www.crystelleboutique.com/sewing-patterns.html         

Blessings, Gina