My dear, dear friend Meghan is working hard to get her esthetician license back and has her test this coming weekend.  She, like many of us, choose to stay home with her kids while they were little and now that her youngest is on his way to Kindergarten in the fall, she is ready to start work again.  The kids and I went to visit her a few weeks ago and we had a long talk about the leap of going back to work.  

She practiced for her test on me and gave me the most glorious facial ever!  You should have seen my skin!  I promised I would make her a bag to take all her items with her when she goes to take her test.  I know she will ace it, but it's nerve wracking for any of us who have been out of school for a while to take a test.  I would be shaking in my boots!

I often find myself saying to friends and family "I'll make you one of those!  No problem!"  and then life gets in the way and I don't get around to it.  I really want to work harder on following through and doing this for people!  

I figured I could multitask (yeah!) on this one and that way it would be work and fun.  I have been wanting to try the Make your Getaway Duffle with piping and it works great!  The piping really makes the shape of the bag pop.  I made my own piping by covering piping that I had around with fabric that matched the bag.

Meghan LOVES blue.  Her home is so soothing and pretty in its cool blue palette.  I thought this Amy Butler Soul Blossoms combo would be perfect for her.  I hope she likes it!  

I also decided to try using duck cloth as a lining instead of fusible interfacing (which I recommend in the pattern if you are using quilting weight fabric).  Then I did my separate lining in a cute baby polka dot which was a thrifted sheet.  The duck cloth worked great and I like the sturdier weight of the bag EXCEPT I found that sewing the lining on around the zipper with my machine was not working out.  It was too thick and the sewing looked messy.  I decided to hand sew the lining in and that worked out really nice.  The lining and the zipper lay so nice and flat now and it didn't really take that much time.

I have debating about getting a serger for a while now and on this project, it would have been great!!!  You could whip these out so fast if you could serge the seams- I could see it being really nice without a separate lining if you had some tidy serged seams in there.   I better start checking craig's list again!

Good Luck on Saturday Meghan!  I know you will do great.