Bag Envy

Have you ever seen a friend's bag and thought "I'd like a bag just like that". Well this has happened to me on many occasions but today I was happily in bag heaven (or its earthly equivalent) when I had to forcibly remove my bag from the shoulder of someone else at The Cotton Patch who had taken rather a shine to it.

Not that my bag will appeal to everyone of course but its kinda funky and quirky and that's the kind of bag that works for me. We saw the fabric by Echino at a show in February and could not resist it (the fabric is on our website with other fabrics by Echino as well as some embellishing tape, some of the fabrics are even more quirky and funky!). The fabric is great for bags being a linen/cotton mix. The pattern is the Swing Bag by Amy Butler which if you've never made a bag before is a great starting point - its not that difficult and in total took 3 hours to make (including a substantial amount of checking it looked good in a mirror and taking some photos so really about 2.5 hours)

To give it stability I used Duck Cloth 10oz which is what Amy recommends in her pattern.

The green fabrics has a design that runs from selvedge to selvedge so it would also make a great blind. Watch out for these fabrics on our website soon!

So a great project for an evening when you can't get in the garden due to torrential rain :-) and its reversible too!

Cotton Patch at The Cotton Patch

We were delighted to welcome Carolie and Tom Hensley from The Cotton Patch, Lafayette, California today. They stopped by The Cotton Patch shop whilst touring in the UK. It follows a very interesting trip to Switzerland which they had won as a Bernina prize as a result of a very successful year for Bernina sales - they had the opportunity of trying out the fantastic new Bernina long-arm machine that will be out in the UK next year.

Carolie founded The Cotton Patch in the US 30 years ago and has been a cornerstone of the patchwork and quilting community in the US, having also founded the successful book publisher C&T Publications, now run by her sons Todd and Tony. C&T Publications (Carole & Todd!) began in the book business when Roberta Horton was teaching at The Cotton Patch. She was looking to put a book together and Carolie had the idea of publishing it for her. Tom took a trip to the library to find all the books he could find on book publishing and the rest, as they say, is history!


We first met them at a Quilt Market in the States, more years ago than any of us could remember precisely. We were sitting at a large round table having lunch, looked across the table and saw the same name on their name badges as was on ours! We swopped stories of how our respective shops had begun.

Each year when we go to Quilt Market we see Todd, who married Jennifer Sampou. Jennifer has designed some wonderful fabrics, originally for P&B and then for Kaufman so quilting is very much still in the family.

If ever you're in the California area, we would recommend stopping by and saying hi to Carolie at The Cotton Patch.