Birthday present project

"All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his."
~Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, 1895

My mother's birthday is coming this Friday. Eep! I had no idea what to give her. So I decided to make her this bag


McCall's 5598





















Finding a bag pattern I liked was easy. Choosing 4+ fabrics is turning out to be not so easy. I spent over an hour last night dragging poor B around making him help me make decisions only to say to him "well I dunno that I really like that, actually." :) He was quite a trooper though.

My first thought, since my mom is a French teacher, was to find some cute fabric with scenes of Paris or the Eiffel tower on it like these Michael Miller fabrics














But they didn't have anything even close at my local Joann's. We scoured the shelves and came up empty handed. As an after thought we checked the red tag clearance and found a nice cotton fabric with tiger heads on it. The reason for the tiger print is that the high school where she teaches' mascot is the tiger, and their colors are brown and orange. She has a lot of school spirit - she wears orange and brown clothes, she has tiger stickers that she puts on the students papers sometimes and she has various other tiger school supplies - so I think she might really like it if the patchwork was some combination of tigers and brown and orange fabrics. Though I only found 3 fabrics that I liked for the patchwork so I was thinking of repeating the tiger fabric for one of the 4 squares.

The cool thing is that my mom used to sew. She still does a little, but I think mostly to mend. She never got a chance to teach me, but now when I have questions I can call her up and ask her and she does the best she can over the phone. So I think she'll really appreciate the handmade bag.