Spring Tote Bag {Promise Me Fabric Tour}

I have a funny story to tell you about this beautiful new fabric line from Poppie Cotton.  I don't know if I've ever explained how it works to be a "maker" for a fabric company?  Fabric sample bundles are manufactured many months before they ever hit the market, so when Poppie Cotton sends me a new fabric collection it won't actually be available for purchase for quite a few months.  (It's pretty exciting to see and handle collections before they are actually out!). 

Promise Me fabric collection

Photo by Poppie Cotton

But the thing is this:  when you are getting a new collection each month, I have found that it can easily get shuffled, sorted through, and the next thing I know I'm confused on when my project is due, when I'm supposed to blog about it, what I'm making etc..  And that is what happened with the Promise Me collection, even though I have a super good solution in place to keep this from happening.  (More on that in another blog post!)

When the Promise Me fabric line arrived I knew immediately that I wanted to make a sweet tote bag.  I didn't even fold up the individual fabrics in the bundle, I just started cutting and designing a tote bag; I had the perfect vision in my mind.  (Remember this was MONTHS in advance; May 2023 to be exact.).  After a couple days of designing the pattern and figuring it out, I got super frustrated with how it was going and I really wanted to totally switch gears I was so irritated.  But I had made a huge dent in the fabric bundle and there would be no moving to a different project.  Instead I took the entire mess I had made and stashed it away.  Super, super dumb move.   

Fast forward SEVEN  MONTHS when I was going through my calendar for 2024 and saw the day on January 26 that said "Promise Me Fabric Tour" and I was racking my brain trying to remember any Poppie Cotton fabric line called Promise Me.  Of course I looked it up and immediately remembered the tote bag.  But then the hunt started.  I looked where it SHOULD be and of course it wasn't.  Then I remembered putting the whole project mess in a bag and stashing it somewhere.  But for the life of me I could not remember where.  I actually started to panic that the bag had somehow been thrown away.  What in the world would I do now??  I could just hear myself calling Lori and Jina at Poppie Cotton and saying "Ummmm I can't find my project I started 6 months ago....)!!!  

I organized a cabinet that had things "stashed away" and there was the bag with the unfinished project and left over fabrics!  So I sat down, looked it over, re-evaluated it, did some machine quilting to spiff it up and guess what???  Oh my goodness, I began to fall in love with the project and remember why I had been so excited to have a tote bag with this fabric collection!  

Tote bag lining fabric is Poppie Cotton Gingham Picnic 

In order to fix some of the issues I was having, I looked at a pattern by Minki at Sewing Illustration called The Everyday Tote Bag.  I've made this bag a few times and decided to use a few elements from the pattern, while sticking with my original design.  Basically which was a zipper pocket on the inside and Minki's design for the zipper closure of the bag.  

I finished it easily and attached some purchased handles.  And I LOVE THIS tote bag!  It screams Spring to me, even though we have been covered in snow!!

The Promise Me collection is exactly what you need if you are like me and already looking ahead to the wonderful promise of spring!  Buy this fabric collection my friends!  It is sweet prints, perfect colors,  and will give you all the happy feels!