Random moosages as I see fit.

Remember this?

Well, now you get to see what it was for.

Starting two years ago, I’ve been giving the most biggest, ginormous, hugest, and EMBARRASSING laundry bags to my graduating seniors (I help care for a bunch of jr. high and high school kids in my church group, I’m a counselor of sorts).  The laundry bag part has to do with the fact that I believe that gifts should be useful.  The fact that they are big, ginormous, and huge really has it’s roots in that it’s less fabric I need to cut and that I can use the whole width of the cloth, which also cuts down on the amount of scrap I have leftover.  The fact that EMBARRASSING has to do with…well, because it’s me. Of course I’m going to make them strange and even EMBARRASSING.

Perhaps you’re wondering how embarrassing they could possibly be.  I mean, really?  Embarrassing to the point of being EMBARRASSING?  Well, I’d like to think so and you can judge for yourself in a moment.  They may not really be EMBARRASSING to the point where the kids hide it in the room they leave behind at home and the laundry bag never sees the light of day again.  Actually, from what I’ve heard, a good number of them actually use their laundry bags as…laundry bags.  Huzzah!  Useful!

Anyway, that large circle I posted the tutorial for is how I make the bottoms of the bags (ok, sometimes with a template too, if I can find it).  There’s really only one right now that does not follow the standard cylindrical bag shape, but I did have to make three of them.  Um…it’s a long story.  You can ask me about I if you want.

So, without further ado, I present you the biggest, ginormous, hugest, and EMBARRASSING laundry bags!

2011:

These were stuffed with a giant body pillow and my comforter for pictures.  They’re still a bit floppy on top.  Like I said, they’re big.  I don’t have pictures of the kids actually inside their bags this year.  I intelligently forgot to bring my camera with me the day I gave it to them.  They also all have grommets and drawstrings at top to close, which you can’t see because the top was too floppy.

A perpetually surprised octopus.

I rather liked his mouth, which is stuffed, and this one had the most hand sewing of all of this batch.  I only put suckers on the two front tentacles that are around the octopus’s face.  Why an octopus?  Because his brother had gotten a squid two years before, so I stayed with the sea creatures.  They were both swimmers too.

A teenage mutant ninja raccoon.

I rather like how his mask and eyes turned out.  It took me awhile to figure out how I wanted the arms.  I settled for arms akimbo ninja raccoon.  You can’t see the tail, but it’s a proper ‘coon tail.  Oh, and this is where the circle was used.  The kid got a ninja raccoon because I deemed this to be more “embarrassing but useable,” as opposed to my original idea, which was one of those ballet hippos from Fantasia (which I argue he would have laughed and liked, but then would have promptly hidden it under his bed), which might have been “embarrassing and likely to get you beat up.”

Sometimes some crimesGo slippin' through the cracks.But these two gumshoesAre pickin' up the slack.There's no case too big, no case too small,When you need help just call...

Originally, I set out to make a cute, chubby cheeked chipmunk for my only graduating senior girl, whom I’ve cared for since she was a wee jr. higher (tear).  Anyway, it seemed fitting to me that she would get a fat-cheeked chipmunk, not because she’s fat-cheeked though.  I drew a pretty good one on paper.  But when I translated that into cloth, um…yeah.  Not good.  It…yeah.  Scrapped that one and I looked for something easier to do still in the chipmunk range.  That left cartoony chipmunks, which are stylized and easier to bring out with cloth, and what better cartoony chipmunks are there than Chip and Dale (Rescue Rangers!)?  I decided on Dale, because he’s goofier and thought he’d look nicer as a laundry bag than Chip.  I’m rather pleased with how he turned out.  Even my mother immediately recognized it was Dale.  This…may mean…that I watched waaaay too much TV as a child.

Erm…I was going to post pictures of the ones from 2009-2010, but I think I’ll save it for another time.  I hadn’t planned on writing little blurbs for each one, but now that I’ve started, I think I’d like to continue that, and it would make this post rather long if I included the ones from previous years.