Trish’s Blog

Sarah’s getting ready to go to her first Girls’ Camp ever. I always thought you had to be 14 years old (Mia Maid in Young Women) to go, but she’s 12 (Beehive) and she’s going, so either the rules have changed, the rules are different for our stake, or I was never paying enough attention to begin with. The camp is four days long and I have only a vague idea of what will happen. I have never been and all my knowledge is second hand. I look forward to learning more about it through my daughters and I will probably serve as a Girls’ Camp Leader sometime before I die… it’s highly probable, almost inevitable… I’ve already had a couple of close calls (heh, no pun intended) in the past. Anyway, I hope I’m ready for that day when it comes.

One of the things that Sarah has to pack is three secret sister gifts. The girls each get assigned a girl to give gifts to and I guess they have to give them to their secret sister without being found out. Sarah has been making friendship bracelets and we have planned that she will give them along with some kind of candy. I’ve also donated a little crocheted bag I made a while ago and must have saved just for this purpose. I’m donating another bag, too.

I have been wanting to try making a boxy pouch ever since I came across a tutorial for it, but I couldn’t do it because I never had any zippers on hand. I bought a few at a sale and then life happened and I forgot about it. Then I found it again on a different blog that I discovered through the Craftiness Room on FriendFeed very recently. I don’t know what it is about this bag that enchants me. Probably the really cute Japanese fabric. I have been making a mental list of things I would love from Japan if I ever go. I want a pattern book to make cute kid clothes, some fabric that you can’t get here, and cute origami paper. I want to try roasted chestnuts from a stand outside the train stops and get dressed up in a traditional kimono just for fun. Maybe my uncle will take me sometime. He speaks and teaches Japanese and his son works for Continental–great combination of assets, wouldn’t you say?

I digress. Back to my boxy pouch making story…

A while ago, I bought some Spoonflower fabric on Etsy. Spoonflower is a place online where you can get your own designs printed on fabric. Some people enter their designs in their weekly contest. The winner allows their design to be sold in Spoonflower’s Etsy shop for one week only. I had my eye on a pear design that I liked and when it won, I bought a yard. I thought it might make a good fabric for the boxy pouch. You be the judge and tell me how you think it worked out.

The idea of this bag is to use fabric scraps because it is really small. I decided that I would just fold the fabric over itself a couple of times and chop off the top. It was three inches bigger on each side than specified in the tutorial. So that’s the bigger bag in the picture, and it’s definitely not as cute. I had some issues with make the sides straight… a lot of times my skills do not match my ambitions. Sarah wanted the bag to fit in her hand like how I described it to her when proposing it as a secret sister gift. So I made it again with specified dimensions, but added loops on either side (one big enough to slip a finger through) to make it easier to pull the zipper. I think it came out so cute with the loops and wanted to embroider eyes on one side of it so that the loops were like ears. Sarah nixed that idea. Oh, well. I thought it might make it more Japanese since they seem to like cute faces on the most unlikely of things.

Here’s another link to How About Orange which has another link to a tutorial on making a boxy pouch that is lined. I like this blog because she finds links for the coolest things to make and then puts them all in one blog post. When I have the time, I go through them. Sometimes, I actually find the time to do them. Like I did this week.

Posted on June 19th, 2009 by trish
Filed under: Crafty, Haley Kids