Crafting Mistake

© by Noreen Doll.

What do you do when you make a crafting mistake?

Throw the whole project away? Try to fix it or erase it? Change it into something new? Or just finish it in a whole new way?

Today I was making gift bags. I made the initial one last night but didn’t have time to do more than one.

So today I thought I would finish the other 11 bags I needed. Because I wasn’t thinking about what I was working on, I attached the picture way too high on 10 of the bags. The bag on the left is what I wanted.

I caught the mistake in time to craft the last bag the way I wanted it, but only the first and last bags were right. So what was I going to do about the other 10?

I didn’t like them with the picture too high because it looked odd. Plus it didn’t leave  much room to fold over the top of the bag and punch holes to thread twine through for tying the bags.

I could punch holes without folding the top over, but that still left the design too high on the bag.

I tried adding a colorful strip of paper under the picture to fill the area better, but I didn’t like the way it looked.

Because there were only 10 bags, I decided to cut all the pictures back off the bags and attach them correctly to new bags. Had there been a lot more bags, I would just have left them as they were and hoped no one noticed that they could have been finished better.

One thing that helped me decide to go ahead and cut the pictures off the old bag is this nifty ruler. All you have to do is lay it where you want to cut, press down firmly, and tear.

I had all those pictures off and ready to reapply in a jiffy!

And even though it isn’t very obvious, I kind of like the look of the extra brown trim around the picture.

On the left (with the snowman head) is the one I cut off another bag and reapplied. On the right (with the gingerbread man) is one that I did correctly.  And you can’t even tell unless you look closely!

And if they don’t read it here, the recipients of the gift bags will never know that the bags didn’t turn out exactly how I meant them to when I started making them!

Noreen Doll

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