Craft Week - Travel checkerboard game

Our friend Henry was turning 5 and we needed a fantastic five year old birthday gift!  Lucy has been more and more interested in games and I've been thinking about ones that can move around with us easily.  Boxes with corners torn and pieces falling all over the place just doesn't cut it. 

 But a simple fabric roll in a bag with fun, heavy, shiny checkers...now that's cool!

 To make the board, I used a simple piece of muslin and created a checkerboard stencil with parchment paper. The kind with wax on one side.  I had never done this before but I'm in love with the technique!!  You just iron the parchment on to the fabric and stencil away.  It peels off easily without leaving a residue.  As long as you have the patience and attention to detail to create the stencil to begin with, this is super easy.  I used fabric paint and then added a cool patterned fabric to the back with a ribbon at the end.  I also added a piece of velcro to the ribbon after practicing the tri-fold that made sense for this set up.

With the addition of a matching drawstring bag, the whole package is complete.  The only frustrating part was that I chose washers as my checkers and tried to paint half.  But the paint kept scratching.  I had to sand them all down again and ended up coloring them with a sharpie marker.  I think that is working better. 

Craft Week - Travel Jewelry and Make up Case

My niece shows horses and is traveling regularly.  She was having a birthday and I thought it might be fun to finally figure out how to make a jewelry/make up case that I liked.  I've seen lots of tutorials for the jewelry pouch but I wanted something that could do double duty.  She needs spaces for barrettes and hairpins but also jewelry, make up and other small items that can get lost in a duffel. 

I sketched this design after viewing LOTS of ideas online.  It was much faster to put together than I had thought it would be.  As long as I was paying attention to the layers and what needed to happen first. 

I made the zipper pocket first, then cut and top stitched the middle pocket that has the circles on it.  I then placed both of these on the brown fabric and stitched them into place.  I added the ribbons at the top and stitched lines into the middle pocket so it would be several pockets.  The one step I missed that I should have done at this stage was to stitch across the ribbons so they were stable once they had barrettes or necklaces wrapped around them.  I ended up doing this in the end but the stitches had to go all the way through both fabrics and it would have been nicer if they were hidden.

After everything was stitched onto the inside piece, I measured for the button on the outside piece.  I pinned the wrong sides together to get a clean edge and pinned the elastic piece for the button closure.  Once turned inside out, I added the top stitch across the bottom.  I really like this little pouch although I think next time I'll use a different clasp.  I think the button was not quite right.  But I still think its a cute little case.