Sigh...oh, Cargo Duffle Bag by Noodlehead, I love you...
I teach sewing classes in Georgia at an awesome little studio in Atlanta called Fabricate, where our guild also happens to meet once a month. It was at the studio, at one of our guild meetings, that I first saw the Cargo Duffle. You've heard of love at first sight? Yeah, well, consider that to be true in this case. My friend Jenny made a gorgeous version in yellow and I was instantly smitten. So, I proposed to teach a class on how to make the bag. With every good class comes a good sample, yes? And since my husbands birthday was coming up, I thought it would be a good idea to kill two birds with one stone-so to speak. I would never kill an animal. Actually, I did accidentally run over a pigeon in Seattle once, but that's neither here nor there. And like I said, TOTAL accident...
Anyway, birthday present! I took myself on down to the fabric store and bought the necessary supplies to make the bag, mostly I just needed the canvas and some accent pieces. I bought some "fashion denim" (because nothing screams "HAUTE COUTURE!" like homemade jeans) and a bit of Cloud 9 organic quilting cotton herringbone print. The shoe fabric was something that already existed in my horde. Stash! I meant stash. Since my husband's favorite color is orange, I bought a spool of cream-to-yellow-to-orange variegated thread for the quilting.
(zipper gusset)
Isn't that thread fabulous?? It's technically machine embroidery thread, but I don't always like to follow the rules (except for in contests, of course, winky wink) and I like to think that I am pretty logical, so I used it anyway. It's only for decoration, right? I didn't use it to stitch the seams together, that might have catastrophic results!
Even the handles were quilted.
(handles)
I really love how this bag turned out, and what is more important is that my husband did too. He's trying to plan a trip just so he can use it, ha ha!
I'm pretty excited to enter this project in to the Family Ever After Sewvivor Contest, I have two projects planned out for the nautical part and the quilted bag part of the competition, it would be so awesome to give life to them!
Best of luck to all entrants! This is going to be a heck of a lot of fun!
-Kristi-
