Zipped Up

 As promised I managed to have a play with these lovely fabrics yesterday, so after a bit of sewing, amending and re-sewing, we now have a pretty little scrappy QAYG (Quilt As You Go) Zippy Bag, all finished and ready to help in the control of my ever growing sewing "stuff" pile.

I was a little concerned at this stage

that is was going to be a bit of a dogs dinner, but I'm rather pleased with the end result.  

 I decided early on, that those beautiful Summers and Waterhouse prints would need a few contrasting fabrics for variation, so I snipped some pieces off of a couple of my Mimosa Sea Linen/Cotton fabrics that I got at the Festival Of Quilts last August from Backstitch, a Little Red Riding Hood print (from an Ebay shop up North (England) called Oriental Direct, they have some beautiful Linen/Cotton prints) and a print for the lining I picked up at Art and Stitch in Peterborough a while back (a drive by on the way to my parents).  By the sound of that I'm a terrible fabric shop tart, but I guess that's what happens when you have a blooming massive fabric addiction nice little stash developing.

So, what have I learned from this process then, well, a few things:

• For a Zippy Bag you don't need to use the heavier weight fabrics, but they do give a nice sturdy feel to the zippy.
• You do actually need to work round in a log cabin way for the fabrics, or you will have to unpick and fold the ends in, which is a right pain in the @rse!
• The thicker fabric, plus the wadding do make it a bit of a pain to wrestle to shape the corners, but not so much of a problem that it would put me off doing another.
• Poly wadding melts if you iron it! ( I knew this, but a reminder never hurts)
• If you get a little bit too into the process of sewing the log cabin patterns, and forget to Quilt over some of the squares, it's not the end of the world (oops), it's still pretty strong.
• Wide mouth zips are actually OK.
• Basting the zip in actually works quite well at holding everything together.
• The liner for a quilted Zippy could be be tapered at the bottom and sides as it wont fit quite so snugly (it may be a little looser like mine).

  So, the million dollar question, will I be making a QAYG Triple Zippy???  The answer is most definitely yes, but I will not be making it scrappy, as it is quite a time consuming process!

Thx to Di for sending me the link to the Elizabeth Hartmann QAYG tutorial, and for Helen's advice on making the Noodlehead, Wide Mouthed Zippy.

Ange x