I was looking for pics to send to a friend this morning and found I had in fact taken good pictures of my crop circle sun bag after all. Being known by Sol Sister, I thought it was time I had a sun bag. It is a recycled messenger made from two pairs of old jeans. The body is legs from Holly's jeans and the handle is the leg from one of my pairs. besides the sun flap, which I love.. my favorite feature on this bag is the iPhone pocket you can just see peaking out. It's made from a bit of my friend Molly's handpainted fabric. My phone slips right in and stays put. I can always find it easily now!.

The flap is constructed with a variation of a technique called Snippets, invented by Cindy Walter in the late 90's. I never purchased one of her books, but I seem to remember seeing a demo on Simply Quilts years ago.

Anyway, this is adapted from that faint memory and a picture I found of a crop circle that showed up in England in 2004. I opened the pic in Illustrator and traced the outline of the sun. Then I traced it again onto the non-shiny side of Pellon craft fuse fusible interfacing and cut another piece of interfacing large enough for the sun cut out. I snipped up a bunch of light blue, teal, dark blue and cream fabrics into very small bits.. about 1/2" max. I cut out the big center and spirals of the sun shape with an xacto knife. I left those inset circles intact as I was afraid they would rip. They were harder to cut later, once the piece was covered with snippets, but no ripping.

With the sticky/shiny side of the interfacing facing me, I started in the center and piled on the lighter colored snippets near the edges of the sun. Very carefully so as not to get sticky on my iron's sole plate, I ironed them down. Lifting the piece up and shaking very gently every so often to dislodge the extra bits, I went back and made sure every hole was covered. Carefully pick up the whole piece and walk it over to the machine. Then go crazy with stitching all over the snippets to anchor them down. I did all kinds of random swirls. Heading back to the ironing board, I finished layering the outer portion of the facing with darker blues and repeated the stitching all over bit again. Once I had the snippet panel ready, I cut out those inset circles at the end of the swirls. As I said, that was a job ... but the final product was worth it. I layered a second piece of interfacing with the cream batik ironed on under the main panel and top stitched around the edges of the sun several times to make sure it was good and secure. I added some dots with a black pigma marker and sewed on this lovely handmade ceramic disc I got from etsy seller BeadFreaky and in each outer circle, a tiny czech glass disc from my just-round-the-corner wonderland, Bead Haven.



Once you wash the bag a few times you get this neat curling and fraying of the snippets. The extra stitching around the edge of the sun is to make sure the layers stay good and stuck down. I didn't want those thin bits lifting later. I really enjoy this effect and the possibilities.

I made a big for both of my bosses from Christmas using the same cutout technique, although just Vic's had the snippet part.... but sadly, I neglected to take pictures. I did snap this not very good picture of a dragon bag Norah (the sister in Sol Sisters) made for her room mate using the same process. In person, it's very deep green and looks pretty majestic against the black. In this case, we traced & modified an image we found on a google serach.