A Better Zippered Pouch

The comments to my last post about zippered pouches had some really great links and advice, which is why I have two better zippered pouches to show off today.

These are sewn from cotton upholstery fabric liberated from my sister's stash. (She's moving and has to sell her house, so if you know anyone who wants to move to Middleboro, MA, and likes old sprawling houses, let me know.) (Also, I'm very, very sad she's moving even farther away. The fabric only helps a little.)

So anyway, it's a thicker cotton, and a sturdier-feeling pouch. Naomi shared this tutorial link, which helped immensely in two ways. Firstly, I added a line of machine topstitching on either side of the zipper, which easily and immediately elevated the pouch into something more polished. It also eliminates any sticky-zipper issues. Secondly, I followed the tutorial's helpful tips on pinning the outer-fabric side first and how to position the zipper teeth. Once the zipper is in and it's time to sew all the sides up, the whole thing is so bulky in the middle it doesn't lie flat, and I was struggling, on my own, with how to approach it. Yay for helpful tutorials and helpful commenters who direct you to them!

My three-year-old daughter claimed one of these as soon as she saw them. I decided the other one was a perfect new home for all those cards I was trying to squish into a too-small pouch.

This photo gives you a good view of the topstitching and how neatly the zipper lies now. Also you can see that I lined the pouch with the same fabric. I have a lot of it, and it just seems like it will put up with a lot of abuse. I really like it as a zippered pouch, but I'm out of zippers that match it (for now, anyway!). I think this fabric will also make a nice tote, so that's in the works, too. You know, eventually.

A couple of quick, unrelated things:

* After a bit of a break, I'm back at my other blog, too, because it's the best place to talk about any homeschooling/life-learning topics and activities. (I suspect it might be in transition for a bit.)

* I had my annual physical not too long ago, and I had him run another celiac panel, because last year my tTG number was falling but still not normal. This year it's about four points above the normal reference range, what the doctor called "not clinically significant." I'm really happy about this because I hope it means my body is just about healed from all the damage I unknowingly did to it.

Hope you had a great weekend! I expect I'll have some things to share this week from the Pages and Paint online workshop, which started out great last week.