Simple Sewendipity: Tula Pouch Testing and Giveaway Winner...

Thank you all so much for your suggestions for my charm packs! I ended up loving quite a few ideas that were floated, so I'm sure that you'll be seeing some works in progress soon. I wanted to give my giveaway post a chance to collect as many comments as possible but we're just about a week out and I don't want to keep you in suspense any longer! Drum roll....

And here's the winning comment:

Congratulations This Dog's Mom - I will be emailing you shortly. I never shared what the giveaway was for, so I hope that you're pleased with being my personal guinea pig for a new pattern that I picked up from michellepatterns.com for a keychain clutch featuring some of my favorite Tula Pink fabrics! I ended up getting this pattern along with two others that I'm hoping to test drive before settling on one to "mass produce" as some teacher gifts during the month of May.

I'm not usually fantastic with patterns as I always manage to muck up some mundane detail or think that I know better than the pattern (ha ha) and end up skipping a critical construction point (which is why I will never, EVER attempt the infamous Weekender pattern). So what did I manage to do with this super simple pattern? Well for starters, I decided that my very first attempt (just couldn't wait until I had done it once and gotten the swing of it) would include the bonus point of trying to line up and fussy cut pattern pieces so that the front of the pouch would feature one Salt Water octopus.

I did....okay I guess. But the pouch's front flap looks slightly crooked to me and I can't tell if I cut the pattern piece crooked or just lined up the fabric a little off. Either way...meh. Plus I accidentally sewed the velcro a little further up than I should have, so it doesn't close as snugly as it should. My last error was that I didn't leave quite enough room for turning the pouch right side out, so it got pretty crumpled and its so small that I couldn't press it perfect and crisp again. Sigh.

I did a bit better with my second attempt using one of my last scraps from the Birds & the Bees line that I previously used on this project.

And even a little better on the last pass around using this aqua cut from the Prince Charming line.

I was also super excited that this was the first project I've finished that feature my custom made labels! I wish I could tell you that these were specially made and ordered by a swanky online label company, but the truth is that I had a few sheets of the printable fabric leftover from my Bookworms quilt and I printed them out myself at home using Microsoft Word. Whatever works, right?

So dear winner, I leave it to you - which would you like best? Your wish is my command! I'm also sending along a little fabric pack that I won at a guild meeting but isn't quite my taste. Hopefully it will have a more useful home with you (or you can pass it along somewhere else and it will be the white elephant of fabric swaps!)