Take me to the river

There we have it! The front of the bag is finished, and I'm very happy with the way it turned out! If you can't tell, the blue swirls are supposed to be water. The fish is swimming happily along a river with little bubbles in his wake. I thought about putting little bubbles coming from his tail, but I think it'll just end up looking like fishy poo. The waves are Mountmellick stitch, which is basically composed of a bunch of connective triangles. This made it particularly well suited to water. The outline stitch would have been smooth but too thin, and heavy chain stitch would have looked weird. Water doesn't usually end up looking like an interlocking chain.

 The spray is composed of French knots. Now, this was my first time sewing both the Mountmellick stitch and French knots. Mountmellick wasn't too bad, I want to work on making it more regular, but I don't think it's too uneven. The French knots were a pain. I kept accidentally pulling them through the fabric and then creating this mutant knot halfway between the front and back of the fabric. It was ugly. I switched to a larger needle and that solved the problem. I didn't have to pull as hard to get the thread through the fabric because the needle was creating a larger hole. I like the way it turned out. The knots have a bit of texture too them. I didn't want them to turn out too regular because spray from waves is completely random. I think my favorite part is the spray coming off of his upper fin. It adds the dynamic movement I wanted to simulate.

 
Now I'm working on the back of the bag. I was initially planning on using wavy plants, but decided that bubbles would fit the theme better. I looked around on google for a reference picture and found this picture from koolrpix.

It fit what I wanted pretty well. Simple, but with perspective. I sketched some bubbles onto the fabric using a white charcoal pencil and then went over them again in a fine-tipped marker. The bubbles will be sewed entirely in the outline stitch using four colors; the same light blue as the spray for the outline and third fill section, the dark blue of the waves for the second fill section, black for the first fill section, and white for the light reflection points. The outline stitch uses thread up pretty quickly when used as a fill, so I'm probably going to run out of floss before I'm finished. My next mainland trip is in November so I may very well be screwed. Oh well. I'll see how far I can get and hey, maybe my island will stock up on black thread. Or maybe I can ask someone to special order it or something. It'll work out one way or another.

In other news, I got hugged by an elementary school student at the conbini today. Awwwwwwwwww.