ayenforcraft

Do you have those types of friends who always seem to be going through what you're going through, at the exact same moment? The ones who seem to pick up the same hobbies as you at a similar time, or you find yourself facing the same existentialist questions at the same times in your lives? And maybe you hadn't spoken in like two years, but there you are, both of you first interested in environmental causes and then human trafficking/domestic violence?

I only have a couple friends that would really qualify under that list, but my dear friend Lisa is one of them. I started this bag for her a long time ago, but it wasn't until this weekend that I had the opportunity to really finish it.

The green corduroy was an unexpected last-minute addition, but I really like the way it turned out. I intentionally left the edges of the "grass" frayed, just for effect.

Am I the last person on the planet to discover the great miracle called a scrap box? Probably. I had no idea it could be so liberating to just dump all your fabric scraps in one box and call it a day. Seriously. For the longest time I had all these weird little bits and blogs hanging off all of my fabric and it was so annoying to cut [I still hate cutting fabric, but this has made it gone from HATE to hate.]

But the best part has been getting to play with unexpected fabric combinations. I mean, that's the thing about a scrap box, right? You kinda just dump everything in there without much sorting or thought. But sometimes you get really unusual combinations that work really well together, and fun surprises jump out at me almost each time I comb through the scraps for little odds and ends [because really, I don't seem to make large projects, just stuff out of small bursts of color].

That's how the yo-yo's came into being, me randomly sifting through the scraps and falling in love with the color combination, and really, I’m not good enough at this fabric-pairing business to just pull out two colors from different ends of the spectrum, and with a flourish, everything looks spanking good together and I congratulate myself on being a creative genius. Yeah right.

And then once I made the yo-yo's, I remembered how I’d been toying with the idea of making yo-yo's into flowers for awhile now, and the rest is history, as they say. And that yellow button? Actually from Ms. Lisa herself. ;-).

So anyways. For Lisa. Thank you for everything, honey!