There is a friend of mine who has introduced me to the concept of having a “handbag project”. She always seems to have a zip lock bag in her handbag which has something creative she can do when she gets the odd moment. She finds this really useful as her children don’t go to school locally and they do a lot of sport, so there are many car journeys for her each week and lots of hanging around and she finds it enjoyable to be able to pull out a few hexagons and sew them together whenever she can.
English Paper Piecing (EPP) is particularly good for handbag projects. Expl
ained simply, you would draw a shape on paper, (I used freezer paper as it has a wax layer on one size and will temporarily stick to fabric when heated) and cut it out. Hexagons or other basic shapes are easy to start with. Once you have cut around the shapes, iron (or place) them onto the wrong side of the fabric and roughly cut them out. Next fold and iron down the overhang of extra fabric and tack it in place. 
For a handbag project the roughly cut pieces, a needle, some thread and small scissors can easily be put in a zip lock bag and ported from place to place to be continued whenever the moment is available. This worked really well for me my adventure with Katie to Australia last year, as from Heathrow, there is no problem having small scissors in your hand-luggage. However, Katie was utterly embarrassed when at Singapore, as we changed planes, we were treated as potential terrorists when the scissors showed up on the X-Ray scanner. Our boarding cards were written on and we had to stand at the end of the queue in shame… So if you are taking a handbag project on a plane… check you know the rules of any transiting airport as well as your departing one !
Once there are a number of prepared paper pieces, these can be joined together to form a new textile piece, which maybe an item to be used as embellishment, as with my flowers above, or a new textile based from which to make a quilt, or a smaller item like a bag or a cushion.
My friend has been using her time all these months to prepare and join tiny 1” hexagons together. A 1” hexagon needs only a tiny scrap of fabric, so she has been doing just that, and using all our scraps up. The resulting piece is still growing and is now only just small enough to be considered a handbag project. Without a doubt the resulting piece will be an heirloom after all this work.
Lindsey’s Masterpiece … So Far …
