Autumn is at the door and a room full of products is ready for sale.
Usually I do not think to start sewing seasonal goods at the right time. School goods are finished once even Arno has reached the schoolhouse. Inspiration for Christmas goods arrives once the sales are announced in the shopping centres, and last time the Easter sewing was left unfinished, because in the middle of the greatest sewing rush the machine went off for repair for several months. It seems to have toured the whole of Europe. I do not know; it could not be bothered to share its impressions.
Last year I sewed 200+ exclusive pencil cases, with lace, frills, rosettes and embroidery. And drawstring bags with appliques and patchwork ornaments. I was pleased with the result myself, and the price did not come out very high compared with what the shopping centres offer. But I sold them for a whole year and a few beauties are still left today.
This time I decided to make above all an affordable and practical product. Out of curiosity. I want to see whether the obstacle to buying handmade is more the price or the availability, the fact that you cannot buy it in a shop.
In sewing today's bags the emphasis was on an affordable price, practicality and the ideology of reuse.
The bags are made of quality water repellent upholstery fabric (rubberised on the inside), from production offcuts. The bags are thin and light, keep moisture out and are affordably priced.
Speaking of reuse: it is astonishing and depressing what enormous quantities of material meet their end in waste containers every day. In one manufacturing company alone, never mind a whole town, a country, the planet. It is absolutely beyond grasping, huge, dreadful. Clearly a company making furniture, for instance, has no use for pieces of fabric under 1 m. My contribution in that is of course an ant's, but a little is better than nothing 🙂 I believe that the attitude alone and even the smallest efforts matter.
I offer 4 different types of bag:
* Pencil case (longer and narrower): 20x8 cm
* Wash bag (shorter and wider): 18x9 cm
* Spa bag or a schoolchild's indoor shoe bag: 26x13 cm
* Shoe bag for an adult: 34x17 cm
As said above, the inner surface of the bags has a rubber coating, so they do not let damp through easily. The seams are not treated to be waterproof, so it is still not worth carrying water in them 🙂
The bags come in very different colours, some decorated with ribbon and some not, with zips in various colours and pulls in various colours. A green bag, for instance, has a green, yellow or khaki zip. The pulls are either the same colour as the zip or in a contrasting colour.
Photographing them took the whole of yesterday. I will now add them to my web shop as I get through them.
