Felted tote bag with detatchable corsage

I am really exhausted this evening as I have had another training session for my tourism course and have been trying to tidy my house in preparation for tomorrow morning’s workshop, obviously it is the tidying up that has worn me out!!  The weather has been really unsettled as well making it difficult to take photos so I thought that I would share my recently made tote bag as I hope the reciepient has recieved it in the post by now.  This bag is the one that I made as part of an exchange organised through Ravelry, a great forum for meeting other fibre minded friends.  I knew the type of bag that my swap buddy would like and also some of her favourite colours.  She also said that she was a casual kind of person but could be persuaded to be funky, hence the felt corsage!  I followed a pattern from one of my books (can’t think of the name at the moment but will add it later) cutting out a resist and a silk lining then laying 6 really fine layers of merino on top of the silk encased plastic.  The surface was then decorated with loads of cut/torn pieces of silk chiffon and I also used quite a bit of gold mulberry silk to add some depth.  With this method there was about 35% shrinkage so you can imagine that I started out with a pretty big package.  I LOVED the result, so much so that I would actually like to have kept the bag for myself if I hadn’t already designed it for my buddy!!  The nuno felted corsage adds a fun touch (I think) and I definitely will make a few of these again and put them up on my Etsy shop.