piano bag

My daughter started piano lessons this past week which is exciting to me for several reasons and one of those reasons is that I get to make her a new bag for her piano books.  Not that we don't already have half a dozen handmade tote bags sitting around the house.

So last night at around 2am when I was up with the baby who is a little congested and is not dealing with it very well, I took advantage of the quiet house and put the baby in his bassinet in my sewing room.

I used the Inside Out Bag tutorial on the Purl Bee and I am very pleased with the result.  It was quick, easy, and different from anything I have ever made.  

Painfully I used one of my absolute favorite prints for the pockets.  It is from Cotton and Steel's Cookie Book collection and it is just the right amount of girly without being pink (my daughter is not into pink these days, but this print does also actually come in pink).  The body of the bag is yarn dyed Essex linen in black (available here) and the bias tape (which I did not cut on the bias) is Essex linen in aqua (available here).  

I did find that the larger pocket gaped a little too much, so I added a small piece of velcro after the bag was finished.  

The Cookie Book print had this adorable (and accurate) quote on the selvage which I added it to the interior of the bag.  

And if you take a close look at the photo above you might notice something that I didn't notice when I was making it at 2am: one of the handles is black and one is navy blue.  I was so pleased that I had enough cotton webbing on hand for the handles, but in the poor lighting conditions I thought they were both black.  Oops.  Maybe I can pretend I did it on purpose.