Braided block tote bag

Green Border

I’ve been hankering to make a really fabulous quilted handbag. I’m not particularly fond of the quilted bag patterns commonly found in quilting stores. They just look too much like diaper bags to me, though maybe I have that association because I still have an 18 month old in diapers, who knows.

Anyway, I’ve been trying to think up a pretty simple pattern that looks complex. I want the bag to be fairly large, but not so big people think you’re hauling the kitchen sink. It also has to have fabulous quilting, but that goes without saying.

So I start playing around with fabric and end up cutting up a favorite fabric I’ve saved for quite awhile.  Unfortunately, once pieced back together, I couldn’t quite figure out what border color to use with it.  As you can see here, the green clashes horribly with the orange fabric.

Now let’s try with blue – NO!

I realized by this time that the original fabric I choose was probably a bad choice. I always liked it because I could see the little purple dots, but overall, it reads just orange, orange, orange.

Now I try it to pair my orange disaster with other similar toned colors. Ah! Now this works much better.

It just goes to show that often the color you like in your fabric isn’t necessarily the color that is super apparent when you look at if from a far distance.  A great tip for being able to truly “see” a particular fabric or color is to take a photo of it.

Even if it’s in poor lighting, a color picture will minimize the image and allow you to judge the color value.  It might look odd to walk through your local fabric store taking photos of random fabric displays, but quilters never seem to care what other people thing anyway…

I’ll post up the end result of this bag whenever it manages to get finished!