I headed to Clapham to find that my 3G signal had deserted me and my inbuilt compass took me a long walk in the wrong direction. Luckily my signal came back and I found my way to Sew Over It where I met some lovely bloggers and the owner of the shop Lisa. If you are a fan of Kirsty Alsopp you may recognise Lisa and her shop from the TV.


Our project was to customise a tote bag. My head is usually full of ideas, but I went blank. Penny from Being Mrs C and Natalie from Style Me Sunday seemed to know exactly what they were doing and started on their patchwork ideas. Sammie from One Blue One Pink was focusing her bag on her blog theme, Alice from An Essex Wife had the cutest Owl design and Ruth from Rocknrollerbaby was making a "Jubilee" design for her daughter. All really good ideas and I had none!

Lisa asked me a few questions to help me decide what to do. I told her I wasn't very girly so she suggested blue fabric and circles. She left me alone for a while and before I knew it my inner girl emerged and I had picked some pretty fabrics and buttons and was asking for a flower template.



The fabric was applied with Bondaweb which is fantastic to use as long as you don't plan on washing things a lot. I had asked the question as I had tried to save time by using it on big man's school trousers before but it hadn't held for long.

I then got to use a sewing machine. The best thing was that as I was a total beginner, the machine could be set to a slow speed, so I actually found it easy to use. I then added a few buttons as the centre of the flowers and butterfly buttons at each strap. Hey presto one customised bag made in a couple of hours.



I had an absolutely fantastic afternoon, chatting with some lovely bloggers, crafting and eating cake. A pretty perfect day!



I would like to say a big thank you to Growing Up Milk Info for enabling me to have a fantastic afternoon. I was under no obligation to write this post, but had such a great time I wanted to share my day and my pictures.