Crayons

Charlotte loves drawing and received lots of awesome art-related gifts for her birthday. Prior to her party we didn't have anything for her to transport her crayons and coloring books in, meaning they rarely go places with us, even though I know she'd love it if they did. Gail and Bill were nice enough to get her a canvas bag (in Gail's signature orange), along with lots of other fantastic art supplies. The bag and those roll-up crayon pouches you see all over etsy and blogland were the inspiration for this project.

I grabbed the bag, some fabric that was accidentally shipped to me when I ordered the bunting fabric (thanks Three Rivers Fabric!), a piece of felt and my sewing machine and got to work adding a pouch to the bag that the crayons could be stored in.
Note: I planned to use some velco, hence its appearance
in the photo, but in the end decided not to.

First, I made my cuts. For an actual crayon roll you'd need much longer pieces, but for my pouch I wanted to keep things small. I cut two pieces of fabric, measuring 8x7 inches each. My felt was even smaller, at just 3x7 inches. Lay the fabric pieces against each other with right sides in and place the felt between them, like so:

Once pinned in place I used my sewing machine to run a stitch almost all the way around the pieces, approximately 1/4 inch from the edge. You'll need to leave an opening a couple inches long at some point so that you can flip the piece right side out.

Flip right side out, then stitch the opening closed. I stitched directly on top (not trying to hide the stitch) and then continued all the way around. I even did a second run to make sure the seams were extra secure.

I wanted 10 crayons to fit in my pouch, two to each pocket, and so measured the felt between the stitching and divided by five. The result was 3cm per pocket, which would fit two crayons nice and snugly. I sewed up and down (shown below in black), to make the separate pockets. Make sure when you sew to go horizontally across on just fabric at the top, not felt, or you'll sew your pockets closed!

Now just use some iron-on hem tape (or fusible web if you have some, I didn't) to iron the pouch onto the canvas bag. You'll probably need to iron from the inside of the bag. If you try ironing from the outside you'll find that the felt is too thick to heat up enough for the hem tape to stick. I opted to iron it on only as tall as the crayons and let the rest of the fabric remain loose so it could be a protective flap.

Add a couple embellishments, fill it with crayons and let your kid take it for a test drive!

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