Christmas 2015: Personalized Pouches, Part 3

Readers! I have excellent news!! Nearly three years into this blog, I have finally figured out how to rotate photos. Notice how I went from this: 

To this: 

Ah! A huge accomplishment! Never again will we have to crane our necks at weird angles to see Taft's pictures. Blog officially more user-friendly. 

Anyway, my Winter Break was pretty much taken over by pouches, embroidery and zippers, as you may have already seen. 

My mom saw all the pouches I was making for my friends, and commissioned me to make some for her coworkers and friends. Yay! Getting paid to sew was one of my 2015 goals.  

So without further ado, here's pictures of what I made: 

My mom picked out little milagros (you can read more about milagros here) for each person. It was fun to figure out how to work them in around the embroidery. 

Love the shape of that zipper pull!

This pouch is for someone who has moved from San Francisco to Brooklyn.

A process photo that was up on Instagram...

I love the color combination of the zipper and lining fabric on this one!

I posted a little sneak peak of this pouch on Instagram a couple weeks ago.

This one had a little Instagram sneak peak too!

I loved doing the embroidery on this one. I twisted a couple different colored strands together because I couldn't decide which color to use!

This is the last of the pouches posts (until next Christmas!), so I figured I'd tell you what I learned: 

1. Never underestimate the power of a good finish, even if it's just the inside and "no one will ever see it" even though they totally will. 

2. Avoid chunky zippers. Never again. I'm sticking to thin, light zippers next time. 

3. Respect your sewing machine's limit. Not all decades-old home sewing machines are meant to sew through 4 layers of fabric. Sometimes they get angry and fling broken needles at your forehead. 

Anyway, there are about 4 more posts about Christmas, and then we can move onto what I've been up to now that school is back in session! There's a couple projects I made for college apps that I can't wait to write about. 

-Taft WK