Watercolor Seahorse Runaround

I finally finished the Seahorse Runaround bag late Friday evening -and carried it to the shower on Saturday. The mommy to be LOVES the design - and can't wait to see the quilt - and the bag managed to stay on my shoulder the entire time.

I still need to add the zipper embellishment - but have not found a chance to sneak up to the attic and muck around in my beads and charms recently. The zipper was a "freecycle" find that was the PERFECT color!!! I could not have matched that better if I had tried!

This is a fun way to really embellish this pattern, but there are a couple of things to note if you want to try this yourself.

1. The watercolor technique really shrinks up the design, so be sure you take that into consideration when you cut your interfacing to start with. Measure a few times -then cut. You also need to take into consideration the bulk created by all those seam allowances and interfacing - it also takes away from the overall dimensions. This bag is about 2 inches narrower than a regular Runaround bag due to a measurement oops on my part- and it makes it much harder to get your hand to the bottom. It is also longer - which was intentional -but compounds the "bottom of the bag" issue. If I had to do it again, I would start out planning at least an extra inch in finished width over the original pattern.

2. Even with sewing on the grid lines, the whole project has a tendency to twist, so take it slow and easy and try to pin at least a bit to help keep things square.

3. Because of the twisting, DON'T run your main design too close to the edge rows - you will probably lose some of it... I did. The poor seahorse lost his tail a bit!

4. Also because of the bulk, DON'T plan on putting watercolor panel to watercolor panel and stitching. Your machine won't like you, and you won't like having to turn it. It's doable - but not something I would do again.

...that's all I can recall at this time.

Have a few more of these planned - so look for more to come.