One of our members is celebrating an amazing 50 years in the Embroiderers Guild, and she is still just as involved within the organisation and enthusiastic about embroidery. She decided to celebrate by organising a competition for our members and she would provide generous prizes.

She is very keen on recycling and repurposing textiles and has a large collection of the free cotton bags which these days are often given out at events. She brought a big pile of them to Skipton Stitchers meeting earlier in the year, there was also a selection of fabric book samples, the sort that curtain shops have. Those of us who wanted to take part took a bag to decorate and a fabric sample to make something.

As usual I left it until the 11th hour, spending the weekend working on my entries – my OH would argue that that is what the eleventh hour is for!!

My bag had a circular motif on it for a gin festival…

An idea came to me in the small hours of Friday night and luckily I remembered it when I woke up in the morning…I would use the scalloped circular edge to make a button design. I wanted to make a practical but pretty bag that I would be happy to use and this definitely fitted the bill.

I rummaged in my quilting fabric stash and found three purples that went well together. The plan was to use bondaweb to stick them all together and to add embroidery to embellish it. As bondaweb does add to the thickness of the design I added the three layers in turn, starting in the centre with the little four circles on the central circle, using buttonhole stitch to go round the ‘holes’. I added some fly stitch and French knots in the middle.

Once the centre was stitched I could apply bondaweb to the centre circle and attach it to the outer ring, using herringbone stitch to edge it. I felt it needed a little more definition so I added a line of chain stitch along the edge

I could then apply Bondaweb to the outer circle and cut it out so it would just nicely fit in the printed ring. Once I’d ironed it on to the actual bag I could then buttonhole stitch round the edge. This bit wasn’t as fiddly as I thought it might be, I managed to stitch round without catching the handles or the back of the bag in the stitches!

My first entry was ready, I’m pretty pleased with this, I didn’t win as there were some gorgeous entries, but I can see this bag being well used.