Center City Road Trip Case

I bought the Road Trip Case pattern by Anna of Noodlehead because my friend Jen made an adorable one for my friend Brenda, which she brought to the last Ann Arbor Modern Quilt Guild sew in, and I obviously needed one, now that I'm doing paper piecing, too. Right?

Any excuse for a new cute bag!

I used the few bits of Center City that I have hoarded. I was not prescient enough to buy more of this amazing line when I had the chance, unfortunately. I was a few rows in on that quilting when I thought, wait, I should have gone vertically, but it's fine. I also added this front pocket. I used the pocket flap pattern piece, and just added a few inches.

I messed up the binding, mostly, by not making it wide enough. It's bias cut, at 2.25", (and I'm honestly not sure what Anna put in the pattern because this was the bit where I stopped reading the pattern, because I'm not great at following directions) but I think 2.75" would have been better, would have made it less of a struggle to hide basting stitches. I added it as I would have on a quilt, but I wish I'd put the join somewhere a bit less visible.

I used some Anna Maria Horner in my favorite color to coordinate, and some Patty Young in my other favorite color to contrast with the big balloony dust balls. And a piece of felt for pins, but I should have squared that up, um, at all, but oh, well!

And I've already crammed the little pockets full of hexagons and pentagon templates. I recently bought sizzix dies for three sizes of hexagons, and I made some corresponding 1" long sided pentagons in Adobe Illustrator (necessitating a trip to Wikipedia to figure out what the radius of a pentagon would have to be if the side length has to be equal to 1"), because I'm going to attempt this amazing pincushion. But I couldn't get the template to open, so I built one. I have no idea how big mine will be, I just matched the pentagon's side length to that of the smallest hexagon die I bought. It'll be an exciting adventure! It might be immense. Probably not. We'll have to wait and see.

A note about the button! It's my favorite kind of button, a real button carved out of  a shell! So it has these flaws, but it's amazing. And heavy!

And now I guess, I'm going to make more of these, because my child saw it and tried to walk off with it, but let it go when I promised to make one in a different color.