Fun with wax cloth - tote and zipper pouch

It has been a fun morning in the sewing room for me! I completed a tote bag with a recessed zipper top (first one ever made...!) and a small zipper pouch, both made from red & white polka dot wax cloth. I love that stuff but it can be a bit challenging to sew if one doesn't have the right footer on the sewing machine. I learned the hard way last year...fabric didn't move through the footer and ended up looking TERRIBLE! Now I have a good teflon-coated footer and all is well!

I love how they both turned out! I found a cute metal dragonfly in my stash of stuff  and put it on the outer pocket of the tote and stitched some little loops to look like it was flying. This pocket also has a magnetic close to help keep those little bits and bobs inside the pocket. I found this tutorial from the blog My Spare Time to show how to sew a recessed zipper. To be honest, I am glad the first one is done as I've been too scared to try it on any other bags. I'm happy to say it was much easier than I expected :-)!

Here are a few more close up photos:

Recessed zipper tote - size approx 16 in h x 15.5 in w

Inside of zipper tote bag

Zipper pouch with handle - size approx. 9in w x 5.5 in h

I have more projects in process and will post more soon!

Jxx

DIY Tag tree: 40 Reasons why you are...SPECIAL!

One of my dearest friends in Zurich celebrated the BIG 4-0 last week and because she is such a wonderful, caring person who would do ANYTHING for ANYONE at ANYTIME, we wanted to do something extra special for her to let her know how much she means to us.

Being the crafty one of our little group of gals, I thought it would be fun to make 40 tags stating all the reasons why she is so special to us (of course, we could have come up with more but thought we should restrict it to 40 for 40!). Over a coffee and chat, we had fun stamping, punching, stitching and gluing tags with what all we came up with. Then we rummaged through my house for the perfect vase (that just so happened to have perfectly matching sprays of fake flowers), added some curly hazelnut branches from lovely Nicole's yard, tied all the tags to the branches, added a bit of burlap-type fabric around the vase with some coordinating ribbons and VOILÀ, here's the result:

Yvette was so happy with it and she told me today (almost a week after receiving it) that she still hasn't been able to read all the tags because she gets too emotional! 

I am so blessed to have such wonderful friends here in Zurich since our families live more than 4500 miles away. Thank you to all my lovely ladies for your kindness, help in times of need, and also all those enjoyable coffee mornings that we couldn't live without!!!!  May God bless you all!

J xx