The Brown Tote and More Progress!

I have piles of 2 1/2 inch brown strips, a bunch of which I used for the last quilt.  I am going to give them away.  I have a pattern for a tote that uses the kinds of strips from which I made a rug a couple of years ago.  I always cut up leftover batting and tried to give that away but no one wanted it so I decided to give the pattern a try.  I had bought it when I won a jelly roll of beautiful batiks figuring I would use them.  I hated to use them before testing the pattern out.  I just started sewing the batting in the strips and then sewing them together.  The pattern called for 40 strips so that is what I did.  It was quite soothing.  I wasn't in the mood to baste baby quilts and needed something different to do.

Here is a bunch of strips sewn together.  I started using tape to keep them straight as the middle was beginning to bow a bit!  The tape worked well so will be using that again.

Here is the bag with the sides sewn together and a pleat in the bottom so that there is some depth to the bag.  I trimmed off all the extra as the strips were all different lengths.

Here I have added the band around the top.  The instructions were not very good on the pattern for how to join the band but I winged it and it is okay.

I decided to just use two more of the strips as the handles and that worked just fine although I will put an additional row of stitching the next time I do it.  It measures about 18 x 18 and is about 6 inches deep.  That is bigger than the pattern shows but she had you cut it down more which seemed like a waste to me.  It stands up by itself but is a little beefy!  I may do another one as it did substantially decrease my stash of the strips of batting!!  You can actually see a little drop in the bag of brown strips as well!

Making progress on the Passacaglia quilt as well.  Working on the next rosette now.  Not sure just how much I will do or how I would fill in areas.

I finished a couple of baby quilt tops with strips I had cut out some time ago but had to supplement them.  They are tops in the these pictures but I basted and machine quilted them today.  Still have a little to go with some free hand quilting on this one.  

It took a couple of afternoons to iron all that fabric!  I also over-dyed the very green looking black with green.  A couple in the gradation of grays were okay so didn't dye them all.  Realized after the fact that I had done a gradation of the new blue a couple of months ago so may overdye that blue as well at some point.