The Grainline Stowe Bag…aka Mama’s got a brand new (project) bag!

Yes… that’s right as opposed to finishing any of the other bazillion projects I have going on, I started a new one!  To be fair one of these was a gift for my office Secret Santa- I actually drew the one other crafter in the office! And by “drew” I mean purposely searched through til I found her name
….the other one is cause my sweater project needs to live somewhere other than the couch!

This is the Grainline Studio’s Stowe Bag, which I excitedly went to purchase on Black Friday during Grainline’s sale only to find it was exempt 😦
Such is life, I found a lot of too many good deals else where on Black Friday

Because I needed to get stared on this right away I opted for the PDF version…. and was reminded how much I hate PDF patterns.  They’re not too bad for small things…. but they suck (in my opinion) for large things.  And don’t fool yourself the large bag is HUGE.

This is the small version of the bag…. and also the one I gave away (hence why there are no pictures of them together).  Fabrics for both the bags came from my local quilting shop.  I was nervous the fabric wasn’t going to be the right weight and the ladies at In Stitches hooked me up with some woven fusible interfacing…which was REALLY nice interfacing!
FYI: In retrospect the interfacing was probably unnecessary for the small bag, which used traditional quilting fabric.  The large bag used Art Gallery fabric (LOVE!) and was useful for some added oomph 🙂

This was my first time using a Graineline Studio pattern.  I liked it, but I found the picture diagrams a bit confusing/lacking and being a visual learner this was no good!

They helpfully provided a video tutorial for the optional step 15…. which I didn’t opt for.  But I also had some trouble with step 10 and especially with step 13.

Stitches wobble, but they don’t come out (hopefully)

Step 10 I was able to figure out after spying the underside of the handle on another bloggers make… here’s a photo of mine in case anyone else was having trouble too.  Ignore the wobbly stitching…

Step 13 was trickier, so tricky in fact it’s an autocomplete on Google!  Luckily, there’s some helpful links in this post that provided the Ah-HA! moment 🙂

Stowe bag: All your yarn are belong to us.

I wasn’t kidding when I said the large bag was HUGE.  That there is my new sweater project along with all the yarn needed to complete it!

Overall I’m pretty pleased with my bag…. I’m already trying to figure out if I have time to make more as Christmas gifts for certain crafty friends and family 😀