Little finishes

Before Christmas, I whipped up a handful of Lola zipper pouches to give away as Christmas and birthday presents.

I started with the intention of making two pouches with some sort of bird or cat print for a colleague, but while I was digging about in my stash, I decided to make a few more. I could have kept going – they always make great gifts – but I was trying to be realistic about how many I had time to make.

I even found coordinating tassels in my stash.

Until now, I had not made the smaller size in the Lola pattern. I do not know why. It is such a handy little thing!

These pouches are so easy to make. The only step that is a little tricky is the square tab on the end of the zipper (not pictured), and my tip for that is to use a Sewline fabric glue pen to hold everything secure while it is sewn. It is just too small and fiddly for pins to be effective.

My other tip is to cut ¼ inch off the top of the lining fabric so it does not bunch up inside.

For my pouches, I use Vlieseline fusible fleece H640 or H630, depending on what I have left in my stash or what they have in stock at my local store. This time, it was only H630, which is the lighter of the two.

This clipboard fabric was never going to be easy to use in a quilt.

I added pompoms to one pouch and also intended to add red pompoms just under the binding of the cat pouches, but the pompoms did not look quite right there, so I left them off.

It was time to use up this Japanese cat print in something.

Also before Christmas, I had a little play in my scrap box.

Scrap fabric is dropped in a tin on my sewing table. When the tin starts to get full and I have some spare time, I sort through it and cut its contents up into useful sizes (strips, squares and hexies) or gather a group of like scraps together to make something.

I pulled out a group of blue scraps that were from a baby quilt I made earlier in the year. They became the basis of a pouch and a pincushion.

For the pincushion, I used a Dresden plate template I had drawn up in 2016. (Was it really that long ago?)

The pouch and pincushion coordinate.

The pouch is based on a pattern from Patchwork Please! but with the side panels replaced with 1-inch hexagons. I have made a lot of these box pouches over the years.

The blue hexagons were made from scraps left after making a blue baby quilt for my neighbour.

Because my favourite things are pincushions, I had to make a second, this time using red scraps from my Christmas tree skirt.

I started with linen and red scraps from my Christmas tree skirt.

One pincushion is never enough, after all.

The Dresden plate centres of both are the same, but I made one pincushion larger than the other.