What the latest Capricious zipper bag made me realise

It’s amazing what having a goal can make one achieve. A little more than three weeks ago, I set myself the silly goal of meeting my average number of zipper bag finishes per year (22 in total). This meant that I would have to finish at least one zipper bag per week for the rest of this year.

This is the fifth one, Capricious / Ailahteleva:

My earlier blog post described 7 ways to come up with names for one’s quilty makes, and to name this zipper bag, I checked the Word of the Day in the Merriam-Webster lexicon pages.

I didn’t pick the current Word or any of the earlier ones. Instead, I saw the word “nonchalant” in the “most looked-up words,” clicked myself to that page and continued my journey through several pages of synonyms and antonyms, until I found the word “capricious”. This seemed apt!

And this is the flip side of the Capricious quilted zipper bag:

You may be interested to see a picture which shows this zipper bag when it was still only a vague idea:

Eventually, the zipper bag panels were ready. (Many of the patches from the previous image will become another zipper bag sooner or later.) I’d recently looked at my earlier post about the 21 easy quilting patterns for small patchwork surfaces and found the mock-baptist-fan pattern. Because the flip side featured rectangles, I thought it a good idea to use. But I ran out of rectangle shapes, so decided to try making sort of similar shapes using free-motion.

Oh well, I wasn’t too happy about my quilting shapes, so I decided to finish the surface with small scalloped stitching lines. And because I didn’t feel the overall quilting was my proudest piece, I played it safer on the other (the front) side and ran bigger scalloped lines over the whole surface:

That didn’t look half bad, and I feel this could be my next, easy go-to stitching pattern.

Here’s one more photo of the Capricious zipper bag in progress:

It is always satisfying to reach this point. I enjoy the process of smoothing and pinning the zipper seams: it somehow seals the top into shape.

What did Capricious make me realise?

It is just weird how motivated I’ve been by this silly goal! There are still 7 weeks of this year left, and I only need to make seven zipper bags to meet my goal. I’m right on track!

Once I had that thought, I realised that this was not the only quilting goal I’ve set myself this year. Not by far! I launched my biweekly newsletter in February, determined to
a) write at least one blog post per week to be able to fill the newsletter with – well, news I guess,
b) publish one splendid colour tip every second week, and
c) get those newsletters out once every two weeks.

So far, only one newsletter has been late (by one day).

At the time of writing this, I’ve also published 79 blog posts, which amounts to an acceptable average of around 1,75 per week. This is almost completely due to the slow start. Because I decided to switch my blog language to English in late December last year, it took me a while to figure things out and get going.

My Finnish blog was more or less a quilting journal and whatever tips or tutorial posts I published, they didn’t follow a schedule. I hadn’t decided whether I would start sharing all of my makes as before. But of course it turned out that way! I’d been doing this journal thing since November 2009, and so I only added a bit of structure to my working.

And how have I been able to do this? Only because I set those goals for myself. My livelihood doesn’t depend on blog posts or newsletters going out in time. This is not work. I don’t have to attract a certain number of readers to the posts.

I remember as clearly as if it had happened five minutes ago how I felt when I first realised that 20 people had seen my blog post! That was the largest known audience I’d ever had for an in-progress quilty item. It still feels great to think that people read my words and look at the pictures of my quilty makes. Thank you for being one of those people!

Final words about the Capricious zipper bag

Though I will always remember the advice by the lovely quilting guru Angela Walters: “Do not point out your mistakes,” it is hard advice for me to follow. This time, too, I will tell you that the curved mock-baptist-fans plus free-motion quilting resulted in a less than flat surface.

Usually, my quilted zipper panels are straight and flat, but not this time. But you know what?

The unevenness doesn’t really show on the finished zipper bag – and where it does, it looks more or less intentional:

Also, Capricious looks pretty nice as a whole. I found a zipper to match both panels well enough, and it was again of the width that goes well with my hexagons. The tab at the zipper end looks pretty cute!

The lining looks good and suitably patchworked:

Capricious is of the Open series of zipper bags, and these are its measurements:

• Width at the top: 22 cm (around 8-1/2")
• Height: 16 cm (around 6-1/4")
• Depth on the bottom: 7 cm (around 2-3/4")

You can follow this quilting blog by subscribing to my biweekly email newsletter. In the newsletters, I share links to my latest blog posts. Subscribe to my biweekly newsletter.

When you subscribe, it is important for you to take the second step: you will get an email asking you to confirm. You will need to click on the button in that email because if you don’t, my emailing system will not send you the newsletters!