Win Some, Lose Some

I *love* it when a plan comes together. That said, we all know what sometimes happens to even the best laid plans. Let's start with the one that went awry.

I was trying to make a pattern for a Kitchenaid cover for a friendly blog reader. I measured. I re-measured. I planned. I felt confident. {First sign that a plan will inevitably go haywire.} I would have felt terrible if she would've just followed my diagrams, cut her precious fabric & then have the pattern not work out. To avoid such an inevitable awful situation, I figured I better just cut some of my own scrap fabric following the pattern right quick. Um, yeah. Here is the evidence that I tried:

:: maybe it can be saved? ::

It isn't too easy to make something fit nicely on an object that isn't very, um, nicely shaped. The front is wider than the back, leaving way too much excess fabric than I had planned. I did manage to repin the whole thing to see if I can get it to fit better. Dear Andrea, you might be better of just buying a pattern from JoAnn's when they go on sale for 99-cents. I'm sure you could tweak it to look like the one you saw at Target :>)

Now for the plan that *worked*.

:: pink damask on the outside ::

:: rainbow of colors inside ::

I had seen crayon rolls {most recently at Steph's blog} and pencil rolls, but really loved the rolls that had the fabric in each slot matching the crayon/pencil color. I think it just adds a really cool dimension to the whole project, not to mention can work as a great teaching tool for the little ones as they need to match the colors. I had this project already in the works & decided to pull it altogether just in time for my 6-year old niece's birthday gift. You could probably do velcro on a strap to hold the whole thing closed, instead of tying a ribbon. I think the ribbon makes it look prettier, not to mention being good practice for bow-tying, yes? I envision several of these as Christmas gifts, when paired with a personalized sketchpad or coloring book. The best part? Using up the scraps that I've been saving makes this a pretty & *pretty frugal* project.