Vonna’s Project Envelopes

A couple of weeks ago when I watched Vonna Pfeiffer’s youtube video on making project envelopes, I knew that was a project I wanted to do. I ordered the velcro and the Pellon Vonna uses. The velcro arrived a few days ago but the Pellon arrived yesterday so I was ready to get started.

At first, I thought the Pellon might be a little thicker/more lofty than I wanted but it’s perfect. It makes the bags look really professional. In fact, when I showed Vince, he said “Those look so nice. You should make them and sell them!” No, thank you!

Even though I have more fabric than I should have, it’s almost all tone on tone, reads as solids type fabric so I’m not going to have any of the pretty, stylish type fabrics to make really pretty bags but they’ll work fine for what I need. It felt really good to sit down at the sewing machine for a couple of hours and to be using some fabric.

Here are the three bags I made today:

My plan is to make bags that are somehow connected with the project they’ll go into. Now, all my projects are in the same, vinyl/meshy white bag and it’s impossible to know which project is in which bag. Of course, not all bags will work with something always. For instance, this is the first bag I made and I made it for the deer project I’m going to stitch for Chad and Nicole.

It will always work for some outdoorsy type project. Quite a few of the samplers have deer on them so that would help me remember if they’re in that bag.

Some of the fabrics are just fabrics on a shelf. Some have special meaning. This one has special meaning. This is the fabric I used on my Glistening Rose Garden quilt, which was the first quilt I made that won ribbons at big national shows.

I don’t even have a decent picture of it but I remembered it’s in Bonnie Browning’s Borders & Finishing Touches 2 book. You know how one thing leads to another. The quilt was entered in one of the AQS quilt shows, Bonnie saw it and asked if she could use it in her book. When she was ready for the quilt, I was fixing to be hosting a quilting retreat near Paducah and told her I would bring it. She ended up coming out to the retreat and several quilters were working on my patterns so Bonnie asked if I’d ever thought about submitting a book proposal. I did and . . that’s how I ended up writing three books published by AQS.

Here’s a funny story about that. I didn’t want anyone to know I was submitting a book proposal because if they said no, then I’d have to tell people I got turned down. I didn’t even tell Vince! I sat down, read everything they wanted included, wrote my book proposal, sent it off with everything they wanted. Later, I was reading about book proposals by other quilters and found out that some of them spent weeks, if not longer, getting their proposals ready. Oh, no . . I did it in an afternoon! I was sure I’d get turned down. A few weeks later, Vince was home for lunch. I went out to get the mail and got my letter from AQS. I opened it outside so I could throw it away without him seeing it, again .. sure I’d been turned down. They accepted it. I went into the house screaming ‘They accepted it! They accepted it!” Vince didn’t have a clue what I was talking about. He said “Why didn’t you tell me you had done that?” I told him I didn’t want to have to tell him if they turned me down! 🙂

Another funny thing . . looking at that quilt, there’s not much of the focus fabric. It’s just in the center squares. Fussy cut squares with the flowers centered and the flowers and the feathers in the border have trapunto.

How did I get so far off track?

The quilt is called Glistening Rose Garden so this will be the bag for Winter Rose Manor. I’m sure there will always be a project with some kind of flowers so this bag will always have a project.

The red dotted fabric will be for something redwork and you know there will always be at least one redwork project in the works.

Now . . back to stitching on Winter Rose Manor.