Meet my new quilted zipper bag called Tribal

Happy Saturday, and welcome to meet the latest make from my sewing studio!

This is a modern quilting blog focused on patchwork, scrappy quilts, zipper pouches, quilted bags, colour theory, and practical quilting tutorials. Today’s entry in the quilt studio diary introduces a finished project: a quilted zipper bag called Tribal.

Dear Daughter suggested the name because she saw in something tribal-like in the pattern in the narrow strip just below the half-square triangles on this side:

I can also share two process pictures. First, the surfaces just after I’d put them together. You can see that they aren’t even properly pressed yet:

All of the half-square triangles in the surfaces must be leftovers from making the Busy quilt, for which I’ve also released a pattern.

A week after taking that photo, I had quilted the surfaces and trimmed them to size. I chose intersecting curves for quilting pattern. I got the pattern idea originally from my IG friend Alfhild @alborve and it is one of my recent favourites. (For my zipper bags, I usually pick one of the 21 easy quilting patterns that I’ve shared earlier in this blog.)

See how the pattern adds movement especially on the lower one of the pieces:

The look of movement is less visible on the finished zipper bag. Instead, the quilting pattern makes the bag look fuller even when empty because it emphasises the lighter-coloured diamond at the centre of the surface:

During the photo shoot, I set the bag on the stump of our old apple tree, but just as I clicked to take the photo, a gust of wind made the bag fall:

I didn’t take another shot of the same side because I thought this made a fun blooper photo for this blog. So I turned the Tribal zipper bag facing the other way and tried again.

This was not a lucky spot for photos today, because the same thing happened again:

I had much better success setting the Tribal bag down, like here on the round rocks:

Tribal quilted zipper bag is of my Open/Avoin series of zipper bags, and its dimensions are as follows:

• Width at the top: 23 cm (around 9”)
• Height: 15 cm (almost 6”)
• Width of the bottom: 6 cm (around 2,5”)

I really like the quilting pattern, especially on this side of the Tribal bag:

The quilting pattern is dense enough to make the zipper bag feel sturdy, and simple enough so that it only accentuates the scrappy surface.

The hexagon-shaped tab at the free end of the zipper is a nice finishing touch. This time, I found a hexie with a fussy-cut bird. The kitty on this side of the bag doesn’t seem to be bothered by the bird, or vice versa.

The Tribal zipper bag has a light-coloured, pieced lining. There is a Kaffe Fassett piece that was a leftover from trimming my Serious quilt, and a piece of fabric that I found in the Ruby Star Society mystery bag that I purchased for making that same quilt.

A light-coloured lining makes a zipper bag more practical because the items inside are easier to see and identify. (This is one of my top seven learnings about sewing zipper bags.) Here though, a darker lining might have been ok as well because Tribal is not so deep.

The next quilted zipper bag is already in progress on my sewing table. If you want to follow what I’m working on and what I’ve finished (and get some quilting tips, too), you can subscribe to my biweekly newsletter here: https://tilkunviilaaja.blogspot.com/p/subscribe-today.html