Still here … a little update

Yes, I am still here and can’t believe that it has been over a year since I have posted anything. It is not exactly that I don’t have time. Hello, pandemic? I am around home most of the time. Have I been sewing? Yup. To catch up a little, why don’t I try with a theme.

Things that hold things. I like them. Always have and probably always will. I have lots of little boxes and bowls, pouches, totes, etc. Recently I made three more. Go figure.

For some reason I decided to make a rice pouch using the pattern by kzstevens. The pattern uses a pieced panel for the bag, but I settled on an Artisan solid fabric and then stitched the same design I had done on a pouch a few years back. All in all, it came together smoothly, however I forgot how much thread is used in the weaving part of the design. I thought that I was going to run out of the lighter blue thread, but fortunately won at this version of thread chicken.

And then I was looking at cute pouches to corral my colored pencils etc. Most of the cardboard boxes fall apart after a while. I was initially looking at a slide down pouch, and then saw that By Annies had a pattern for a fold down standing pouch called Flipping Out, so I started with that one. It looks like this closed…

And like this when opened.

The pattern makes a large and a small size and being me, I could not leave well enough alone, so I basically made it the width of the large case but the height of the small one. They recommended trying the large one first, but it was so tall that I thought that I would never use it. Attaching the base is a bit fiddly so I knew that doing that on the small one would be difficult, hence my hybrid approach. I also made the top and bottom and the bias binding all out of the same busy fabric so that any wobbly stitching at the base would not be too obvious. I think that it will be good for my sewing tools when I take my machine somewhere just for a day – just the basics.

Eventually I did get around to trying a slide case for my colored pencils. When getting ready for a retreat in March I packed up the pattern and all of the materials needed to make the Stand Up Slide Down Pencil and Tool case by Caroline at SewCanShe.com. The construction was not difficult, but the case did not slide up and down very well even though I used the rip-stop nylon for a layer as suggested. As luck would have it, there was someone there that had already made one of these cases. She added an extra line of stitching that would help the inside lining slide down. That helped a bit, but I still need to convince the lining to move out of the way when I open the pouch. Here it is openand closed.

Also, I realized that I did not really need it quite that tall for my pencils, so perhaps sometime I will make one again and figure out which part does not need to be as tall.

And there you have it, three more containers to add to my collection.