Pouches made, boxy pouches in progress

I decided that I needed something to put the jars of taco seasoning and marigold seeds in when I hand them out. I found a pattern on youtube for a pouch made out of a placemat. I modified the pattern and made two other sizes. I cut the pattern out of mat board and was able to run the rotary cutter along the mat board to cut the pouches out except for the corner cut outs which I did with scissors.

The first pouch I made was too big for what I needed so that is when I made a pattern for a smaller size.

I cut up these wall hangings to make the pouches plus several others I didn't have pictures of.

I had a bunch of 11" zippers I had bought years ago. They were inexpensive and various colors in a grab bag type of deal. I finally was using them! It took all day to sew the pouches together and I ended up with 28 pouches I think. I was getting pretty fast and was able to get 3 sewn in about 50 minutes. I made a couple bigger ones for gifts. What was nice was I didn't need an iron the whole time.

I had some bigger scraps, but the scraps were too small for even the small version so I just cut them as big as possible. I will sew these together and they will make cute stocking stuffers. In this picture in the background is the larger pouch and the medium taco seasoning pouch.

I got the pouches loaded with the seasoning and seeds. They are ready for me to add the recipe. I need these for Thursday so I will have this job done in plenty of time! Yeah!

I decided to put a couple of the longer wall hangings to use. This one is going on my nightstand.

I am going to find a place to hang these two vertically instead of horizontally.  You can't see, but they are match stitch quilted and have a facing style binding. I will have to post a picture tomorrow. 

The pile went from this

to this

Sunday I spent a good part of the morning cleaning up the mess from the pouch construction and clearing off my big table from the stuff that had accumulated. The next project was to work on the boxy pouches. I got all 20 zippers installed while I watched/listened to the movie Ben-Hur.

I then flipped on football to topstitch the handles and trim them to size.

I opened up my new iron to try it out. I needed to press the fabric back so I could top stitch the zippers of the boxy pouches. My brother had this iron and I like it a lot! Great steam! I bought this one a couple weekends ago on sale.

Here are the boxy pouches all press and ready to topstitch

Here is the first one I'm topstitching, then I folded the right sides together to sew the bottom. Only 19 more to do!  I need to have these done by Thursday so you know what I will be doing this week!

I also cut out a tote bag. I want to gift a quilt so I am making a tote bag rather than wrapping it in paper. One more thing I need to get done in the next couple days. LOL!!

Sunday afternoon it started to rain and then we had some quarter inch sized hail.

I did get a package from Wawak which is a sewing supply company. I bought some zippers, a seam gauge, and this chalk sharpener. The sharpener was on sale. I had been eyeing it and with the bulk discount on zippers, I bought enough for free shipping. The sharpener works great! I use tailor's wax to mark things and I always just sharpened the edge with a pair of scissors which wasted a lot of material. The tailor's wax disappears with heat by the way. Well this sharpener makes a beautiful sharp edge and I am so glad I finally bought it.