At the start of the month I had a lovely weekend looking after one of my nephews.  He’s eighteen months old and a bundle of fun and normally really well behaved…. but when Auntie C comes to visit things change!

I went through his normal bedtime routine on the Saturday evening; milk, lots of stories and giving him a kiss before putting him in his cot and then putting on the lullaby machine.  As I put him in his cot, he shut his eyes, cuddled his teddy tightly and looked angelic!  I quietly shut the door and walked downstairs and picked up a magazine to read and sat down on the sofa… and listened to the wailing start.   My sister had told me to leave him for a little while the first time, so I tried to ignore it for a little while and he eventually started chatting to himself.  He’s at the stage of noises that sound like a conversation but they make sense only to him.  This continued for ages and I thought to myself that this wasn’t going to stop any time soon.  So I went upstairs and walked into his room; he greeted me with a beaming smile, a face that said ‘I’m not tired Auntie C!’ and he reached out his arms to me.  I picked him up and took him back downstairs to play for a while before taking him back up and letting him fall asleep on me before putting him in his cot.  I went back downstairs utterly exhausted and it wasn’t long before I went to bed myself!

A couple of days after I got home my sister sent me a card to thank me for babysitting and my nephew clever little thing that he is sent me some Dunelm vouchers for being such a pain!  Yesterday I went in for a wander; they have lots of curtain and upholstery fabrics, but not many lightweight cottons that I like to use, but I was inspired when I saw this tea-towel bundle for £2.99 – projects started jumping into my head!

Tea-towels are actually a really good value way of buying material and you get some fantastic designs.

Time to spread some more happiness at work – Project number one is a pencil case for my Cinderella:

You will need: a piece of outside fabric, a piece of lining fabric and a piece of interfacing that are all 23 x 23 and a 20cm zip in a suitable colour.

Iron your fabric before you start.  I tend to sew my interfacing to my lining fabric so that I’m only fiddling with two layers of fabric instead of three when I pin everything together!  Pin the right side of patterned fabric to the top of the zip and the lining side of your fabric to the back of the zip as shown in the picture below.   Use the zipper foot on your sewing machine to sew as close to the zipper as possible.

Fold the pieces of fabric around so you repeat the process with the other ends of the fabric, the patterned side of of you outer fabric should be together and the lining fabric should be ‘inside’ too; this is what it should look like once it’s done.

Remove all of the pins and open the zip inside, it will be a disaster if you don’t!  Pin and sew along the seams indicated below – make sure you leave a gap between the two marks.

Turn your pencil case the right way through the gap and poke out the corners – I find the blunt end of a knitting needle is really useful for this job!  Carefully sew the seam so that the ends of the fabric are all hidden.  This seam will be hidden inside at the end.

Push the lining inside, admire your handiwork and fill with writing goodies!  Project two to follow soon!

Project featured in Back to School Projects – Rook No.17 – A Little Birdie Told Me No.32 on Tuesday 09.08.11