Boro Patchwork Grocery Bag
I have several other projects to finish this afternoon, so I'm going to run through the details quickly here because I know some of you want to make one too!
- This is the small size from the Grocery Bag pattern.
- The base fabric is chambray shirting fabric. A light weight cotton is perfect and a solid, near solid, or subtle print is probably easiest to use as a base fabric. The additional patches will start to add weight, and even though this bag is small, it feels very nice to hold.
- The patchwork is inspired by "Boro". This blog post is a great place to read more about this traditional Japanese patchwork. Boro is usually done in indigo fabrics, so I stuck to my blue fabric scraps. Next time I might do this in more colorful prints. I love the blue, but think it will be a good challenge for me to make this in some other colors. It's more of a composition than the pieced patchwork I've done in the past. It didn't require a lot of thought, but things did get moved around before being stitched in place.
- I cut the bag body pieces out and then free hand trimmed 3 larger scraps (for each side) and stitched them to the chambray. Then smaller pieces were added on top. The fun thing about this is you can put fabrics over the top and under other patches.
- The 3 main pieces I kept towards the center of the bag. Then I did make sure some patches went all the way to the edges of the bag. Others are just floating in the middle.
- My basic strategy for the prints was to include some stripes, dots, and florals.
- A 2.2 stitch length was used since the edges are raw and will fray. Some patches I stitched around twice because the fabric weave is loose. You can tell how tight the weave is by how visible the threads are when just looking at the surface and also how much it frays. Loose weave = lots of fraying.