Tuesday at the {picnic} Table

Welcome back to the {picnic} table!  Did you remember there's a guest post at A Quilter's Table today? It's my pleasure to welcome my daughter, who is here to share one of her recent sewing finishes!

Hi! I’m Rachel and I blog at Snippets of Sweetness. When I was asked to write a guest post for Tuesday at the {picnic} Table, I immediately knew what I wanted to write about. Pink Penguin’s lunch bag has been on my To Do list ever since Ayumi published the tutorial. With the sunny summer weather finally settling over Seattle this month, it was the perfect time to whip up a new lunch bag and embark on a quest for a personal picnic spot.

A quick search through my stash turned up the perfect fabric for this particular project: a fat quarter bundle of summery fabric from Fruit-A-La-Carte by Hoodie for Timeless Treasures. Usually, I gravitate toward cool colors and geometric prints, but I have a weakness for food fabric.

Pink Penguin is one of my favorite crafting blogs; Ayumi has impeccable taste and a knack for choosing cute fabric. She creates exquisitely unique items that often urge me to run straight from my computer to my sewing machine. I have followed her tutorials for her fabric basket and reversible patchwork bag in the past, and have been quite happy with the results. For whatever reason, I puzzled over the lunch bag pattern several times before I started. However, I’m not one to follow a pattern or recipe exactly, so I made a few modifications to her lunch bag pattern, one of which was unintended.

For starters, I am scared of interfacing. It’s silly, I know, but I am convinced that I’ll mess it up somehow and end up with the interfacing stuck to my iron instead of the fabric. I’m rather fond of my iron. Instead of interfacing, I used Insul~Bright in the main part of the bag. I was pleasantly surprised with how cold it keeps my food. A lunch packed at 7am is still cold at 12pm! The other major change I made was accidental. I cut all the pieces correctly until I got to the Insul~Bright, which I managed to cut ½” too short. In the end, I just trimmed the rest of the pieces to match. Next time I make one of these, I will use interfacing, at least for the handles, and make the whole thing a little bigger.

Once I had my Personal Picnic Purse ready to go, all I had to do was find a personal picnic place. Luckily, there is a small park-like area just across the street from my work, and once I ventured over there, I found that it has well-situated benches that provide light, shade and a perfect vantage point for people-watching. My Personal Picnic Purse has inspired me to eat my lunch outside every sunny day since I made it. It’s just too special to sit on my desk all day. Here’s hoping that my Personal Picnic Purse inspires you to make your own, and to enjoy eating alfresco whenever you can.

Thank you, Rachel! What a darling project!


Do any of the rest of you have a picnicy project or recipe to link up? You can do that right here, where the link up will be open through the month!