My crafting - Pencil cases for the children

I had bought and filled two cheap, see-through, pencil cases from Tesco for the children so that they each had some pencil crayons, a couple of pens, a couple of pencils, a ruler, sharpener, rubber (eraser), scissors and glue.

These have been fine and working a treat.  They are both very proud of their pencil cases, keep track of them (mostly) and put their things back in them when they've finished (mostly).

HOWEVER... Santa brought them a large packet of new pencil crayons each for Christmas, and these just didn't fit in the pencil cases.  It only took a couple of weeks for the cardboard packet to start falling to pieces.  A shopping trip to Edinburgh was disappointing, either the pencil cases were covered in improbable characters, or they were really expensive, or they were as small as the ones we had.  I trawled Etsy... some gorgeous pencil cases, but difficult to see what size they were on-line.  And seeing the lovely hand-made pencil cases on-line got me to wondering whether I could make some myself.

I tried once, but unfortunately didn't measure the pencils first, and ended up making really beautiful pencil cases that were too short (lovely bags for small toys though).  This did give me the confidence that I could make a really nice quality item though, so I had another go.

I won't go into the instructions here.  I used this excellent tutorial from the Dining Room Drawers for lined pencil cases, with the addition of a first attempt at applique using bonded interfacing, and also a tuck to give the pencil cases some depth.

The photograph below shows the finished articles, though it doesn't really do them justice as they are, though I say it myself, excellent.  I am soooooo proud of them, and the children are very happy too.  I'm so happy with the results that I'm going to make a couple more this week to put as the first items in my "stock box" to sell!