Sewing: Elephant Pouch

Since I am a librarian, I have this wonderful luxury of seeing all the new and wonderful craft books that come in and out through our library. One day while searching our catalog, I found this great book.

It had a lot of great projects by various crafty bloggers, some projects more enticing than others to me, especially this certain project...

I squee'd with girlish delight and knew I had to check out the book so I could make this one item. Well, I had the book for quite a while before the other night I decided, "I NEED THAT ELEPHANT POUCH, ASAP." Off to Grandmother's I went to sew! Digging through my fabric bin, I chose these two fabric colors for my pouch.

I liked the dark blue, and even though it had a pattern, it looked very elephant skin like to me. I picked the ribbon fabric for the lining because a) it's cute and b) it's colorful without burning my retinas. I started it a couple of nights ago, and by starting I mean doing all the boring things like tracing the pattern from the book onto tracing paper and cutting out all the pieces. I later realized that I cut out the trunk pieces wrong, so I had to go back and re-cut those.

Anyways, here's my finished product after about 2 hours tonight!

Mine looks sorta, um, "special" compared to the book version, mostly because instead of adding that quaint charm I made a pact with my brain that we would just use the sewing machine for everything! I hand stitched the white of the eyes onto the face and the lines on the trunk. The black part of the eyes are glued on with tacky glue (Liiiiiifesaver!) and the rest of the elephant was crudely sewn with my machine.

Inside shots below.

All in all, it was a nice sewing experience. The instructions in the book were VERY EASY to follow, and the pieces were small enough that you didn't have to blow up the pattern to make the item. I really appreciated that. It was also a quick craft! I don't know if it's because I did all the lame stuff before I sewed, but I definitely had fun sewing this little guy. Now my purse has one more item that it didn't need before :)