Beach bags and Valentines

Now I must admit I'm not the beachiest kind of girl, it's just not the first place I think to go on a summer's day, but now that Hazel's older and loves it so much we do go more often. I usually end up with two bags full of stuff, or one bag stuffed to the gills and oveflowing and I finally got sick of it. I searched through all my craft books and my bookmarked online tutorials, I even googled, but I couldn't find a bag that matched what I had in my mind so I was forced to make up a pattern myself! And yeah, I was kind of pleased I had to because it made me feel all clever and stuff. ;) So this is what I came up with for my first attempt.

It's 55cm (21") across the top and 14cm (5 1/2") deep and I think it'll be able to hold a LOT of stuff! Mission accomplished. Or is it? Well to be honest I was aiming for something with a bit more angle to the sides, just for style, so the top would be much wider than the base. I'm not sure if I should continue experimenting (what does one do with the unwanted bags?) or just be happy with this one. My bag-making knowledge doesn't really extend far, I suspect I'd need some sort of stiff interfacing to get it to sit nicely with an angle like that, instead of the soft fusible fleece that I used. The fabric is a piece of cotton I aquired from my MIL's small stash. It was very stiff and shiny, but when washed came out lovely and soft and cuddly. The red ran like crazy, so the stripes that are now a light pink were white, but I quite like the old, faded look it has now.

I thought I'd also show you what I ended up doing for Mat and Hazel for Valentine's. I did use the lovely tutorial for decorated matchboxes over at Inchmark, although I had to make up the matchboxes because I couldn't quite face putting candies into boxes that had once held matches! Perhaps it's possible to buy empty boxes, I don't know, but making them wasn't too hard. I used a template available as a .pdf from here.

The top three were for Mat, the bottom three for Hazel. I stacked the matchboxes together with the 'portrait' ones on top and tied them with a ribbon. I picked out the pink and red smarties from a big bag, same with the jellybeans and the jelly dinosaurs. And yes, the rest of the bags have largely been eaten now! Oh the shame...

*Don't forget to enter the giveaway a few posts below - closing in a couple days!*