Toiletries/Wine Bag

10 years ago, I loved Pottery Barn stuff so much that I received their catalog regularly in the mail.  Of course, I could only afford about three things in their whole inventory, so one day I bought one of those three things.  Ladies and Gents, meet my toiletries bag!  As you can tell, I've taken it on every single trip since then.

It actually is meant to be a wine bag.  How it became a toiletries bag is a mystery to me.  Maybe I loved it so much (velveteen outside, silk lining) that I couldn't bring myself to gift it, so I thought of other uses?  Who knows.  Anyway, it is threadbare now and needs to become a fabric scrap.  So today, I made a new one!  Since it is meant to be a wine bag, I couldn't help but show the new one with a bottle of wine in it, but it will absolutely serve (hopefully for the next 10 years) as a toiletries bag.

The fabrics are both heavy duty IKEA fabrics.  I got the blue stuff on sale at $4 a yard, which seemed like a steal.  What's interesting about this is that I chose to make a bag exactly that size and shape again.  At some points over the last 10 years, I've thought that it is too narrow and deep for toiletries, and it is sometimes annoying for that reason (there is a limit to how much can fit in there).  However, I opted to go for the same design because the narrow-ness is actually helpful in keeping my toiletries from taking up too much space in my suitcase!  It is also without a zipper that could break, and it is easy to carry around when I'm in a space-not-my-own.  Plus, those annoying TSA regulations have made it so actually, all my stuff does actually fit in there.

My day today started off with a custom Etsy order for some bike bands with this new ribbon I got last weekend.  They will be a Christmas gift for a woman in Virginia who just got a new bike.  Her daughter says she has been frustrated that she hasn't been able to find these invaluable accessories anywhere, and of course, nothing as cute as this anyway.  (Ok, I threw that last bit in---the daughter didn't say that, or the word invaluable either.)

Today, my biggest task was finishing up making my Christmas cards.  You know I won't spoil the surprise here, but here is a little teaser of some of the parts.  I will of course post the final product after Christmas day.