The Elephant Bags

Elephant!  I’ve returned to my elephant obsession, this time in the form of decals.  Everything can be sewn with an elephant, with the trunk up with good luck.  My favorite is the brightly striped one — it is made from an umbrella that was broken and discarded on the streets of Belfast.  If only I could find purpose for all of the city’s dead umbrellas!  So much material and metal just lying around in need of a employment, that mission has been living in the back of my mind for four years now.  It was surprisingly easy to disassemble and restructure the umbrella fabric, so maybe I’ll go down this road further!

The purple-green bag comes from my batiking days of high school.  I was investigating Middle Eastern patternmaking, and I found a tile pattern in a book on mosques that resembled this.  I never did anything with that swatch of fabric til now, I like it like this.  The other fabrics are upholstery samples thanks to Ida + Ginny, church ladies extraordinaire!