All of the gorgeous papers and embellishments in the kit come packed inside a plain cream calico bag which you could use as a shopping bag, as storage for your stash, a tote to take along to your crops/crafting days; or as a protective case for one of your smaller albums.
And you could simply take it out of the box and start using it without doing another thing to it - if you wanted to. But why would you want to when you could customise it with some of the beautiful fabric and 'stitchy' themed embellishments which come along with it in the 'What's the Story?' kit?
So where are you going to begin decorating your calico bag? Well, how about you start off slowly, warm yourself up - crafty-wise - and simply pin the 2 badges from the kit onto it! It's a start .... and we don't want to peak too early do we? ;) I recently customised a bag very similar to the one in my 'What's the Story?' kit and I used lots of previous Quirky Kit items to decorate my blank canvas:
To create something similar with your calico bag begin by looking through your scraps of fabric from your stash and items left over from previous Quirky Kits - [which always include at least one fabric item and often includes many more].
The fabric [with the tree and buildings pattern] below came from the 'Hot Date' kit:
As you can see I layered up the fabrics with embellishments in exactly the same way I would would with a layout.
To secure my fabric in place I used some iron-on adhesive tape [like wonda-web] to hold it - then hand stitched around the edges for more of a decorative effect.
Once your fabrics are in place began start adding your 'What's the Story?' embellishments one at a time until you're happy with them. There's:
- the length of zig zag edge lace, the Japanese ‘sewing labels’ printed cotton tape;
- the length of red lace covered ribbon and herringbone cotton tape;
- fabric rose bud embellishment and the fabric heart patch embellishment.
Some of my fabric embellishments came from past Quirky Kits. This 'Create' tag came from the 'Resolutions' kit:
.... as did the ribbon [far left] which I machine stitched to my bag handles:
The beauty of this sort of project is that you can keep adding to it over time - it needn't all be completed using one kit. There's plenty of room for any additions from future Quirky Kits too!
For more ideas of the kind of items you can use to decorate your bag, pop over to this post on my Copy + Paste blog, which features more photos of my bag [there's even a giveaway!].
If you're eager to start adding colour to your plain bag then have a look at the brand new 'Sew Embellishy' Mini-Quirky-Kit which contains some very pretty fabric, felt, buttons, sequins and even thread: 
For iniration on how to turn your raw materials into unique embellishments [which you could then add to your bag or a card or layout] check out Leo's fabric embellishments tutorial here.
Happily [but probably unsurprisingly as Leo's kits are always impeccably co-ordinated!] eveything in the Sew Embellishy kit will also work beautifully with the upcoming, colourful 'Summer Fete' Quirky kit:
Exciting sneak-peek eh?
When you get around to decorating your 'What's the Story' calico bag remember to share it with us won't you? We have a 'Crafty Templates' Flickr group which you're welcome to join and contribute to. Plus we're always happy for you toleave us a comment linking us to your projects on your own blog or your UKScrappers galleries too.
I'll be back soon with more from 'What's the Story?' - where the story was 'I need to make a man-friendly-mini-album'!
Until then, happy crafting!
Julie :)
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