Pretty In Pink – Travel Sewing Kit

Now that Christmas has been and gone I can finally share some of the presents I made for my family. First up is my sister’s ultra cute sewing kit. She doesn’t sew but just wanted a few things to enable her to do the basics. So I bought her some needles, little scissors, threads and pins (and made a tiny pincushion!) – and made the kit to hold it all in.

I followed the excellent tutorial on the blog of ‘Lots of Pink Here’.

I’m really pleased with how it turned out. It’s functional and pretty! Win-win!

It folds up into a handy A5-ish shape, and has a long tie to fasten it.

I really enjoyed making this, mostly because I have been making a lot of clothing over the past few months; this made a nice change and used some different techniques.

To begin with I had to quilt the main pieces. OK, it’s only a bunch of straight lines but I liked sewing them! And I think I did a pretty good job at keeping them straight.

The tutorial calls for bias tape, 2 1/4″ wide. I was feeling lazy so thought I’d cheat and use some ready-made tape. The snag was that it was only 1/2″ wide. Hmm… a slight difference!

It was fiddly, but it wasn’t as disastrous as you might think. The result was a cute, neat edge on the pockets. Luckily my slanted stitching is only visible in the photo – not so much in real life!

The sewing kit has two good-sized pockets, a thread holder, a scissor case and a little needle book. The scissor case was probably the most frustrating part; it was a challenge trying to get it straight!

The thread holder is a cute idea. It’s got a teeny bit of Velcro to hold it down, and it can fit three or four spools of thread on it; although to be honest the strip is a tad thick so they don’t slip on very easily!

Once all the bits were sewed on, I just had to trim the edges with bias binding. It suddenly occurred to me that I made too much bias binding when I made my Sorbetto top – out of the same ditsy floral fabric that lines this sewing kit!!

So I used that! And there was just about the right amount. I machine-stitched it down on one side then hand-stitched the other, which gave a nice neat finish that I’m pretty proud of. I achieved some good metered corners, too, which was new to me!

And that’s it!

Shame I didn’t take a photo of it all filled up because it was really cute!

As I’m not doing a lot of sewing at the moment due to it being the school holidays, I will share a couple more of the gifts I made for Christmas soon!

Beth x