Thoughts and feelings about this bag

Hello!  Perhaps you, too, are currently crafting in a sea of uncertainty.  I find myself desperate to finish something, but starting lots of other things as well, which is clearly not helping with the finishing things thing.  

Awhile ago, who knows how long, I saw someone talking about using sashiko to patch or repair fabric that was torn or worn, oh, and I saw a bag someone posted using boro stitching techniques, and it stuck around and I really wanted to make myself a bag.  Not a Japanese knot bag, but a bag approximating the shape of one I got a little over a year ago that seems to be disintegrating.  

I could swear I had busted jeans - piles, even, jeans from myself and others - around here somewhere, but I can't find them.  I have three old pairs of khakis, the kind before those devious manufacturers figured out they could put lycra in the fabric and have it be better in some sense, and a fabric stash to rival... other people's moderately-sized fabric stashes, so I dove in.  

I quickly found that one of the pockets of one of the khakis is a lovely not-denim woven material - that's the upper left.  Bottom right is a thin linen-y fabric I got when I was making my own wedding dress (a project I came close to completing!).  The foundation fabric is from deep stash, unobtrusive but not too wimpy to hold everything together. 

Initial fabric placement

And so now I find myself using a technique for scarcity in a time of abundance.  This doesn't need any more patches (well, okay, there's a spot in the upper blue that was where a button had been sewn on that is a little torn).  Oh, and the bottom left, with the new blue patch, is covering a spot where I was cutting something on top of that and snipped right through the khaki.  Whoops.  Good thing I'm using a patch-based approach. 

I didn't know what to do with the expanse of tan there.  Patching for the sake of patching seems silly, and I don't have a wide variety of other materials to choose from.  Then I thought about adding a pocket.  I didn't need an outside pocket, but one might be useful and it would spare me having to stitch just lots and lots of stitches across there.  

So I found on the internet a picture of a fetching pocket and am going to try my hand at making one.  This should be interesting.  

It would be very easy to add a tiny bit of my beautiful, delightful quilting fabric to the outside, as a patch or a pocket, but I'm resisting the urge, because for anything I choose it will be come the that-thing bag.  If I use yellow flowers, it will be the yellow flowers bag.  But I want it to be the blue and tan patchy bag.  


Baby Raccoon

I am down to two colors remaining on the Baby Raccoon, and then an unknown but not-insubstantial amount of filling in stitches that I missed, probably in every single one of the 16 other colors. 

I've also started an Aquarius cross-stitch (from Satsuma Street), which will be a gift for my kiddo at her next birthday, and which she immediately sniffed out, and which I now have to hide faithfully and only work on at about after 10:30pm.  For SOME reason, it's not done yet.  

I finished the first teeny beech strip quilt and started another.  It doesn't feel like a finish yet, because I'm totally going to wash it, but it's already stuck to the wall, soooo.  

No more masks, because I'm pretending we'll be done with them soon.  

I try to do a bit of the elephant every day, so it is inching forward.  Everything is inching forward.  

Happy crafting!