I took a break from quilting — which can be tiring work, manipulating three layers of fabric in the heat — to make this.
It’s a tool roll.
Over the years, I’ve watched middle schoolers, high schoolers and others struggle with pencil cases. The pencil cases fill up with broken pens, pencils without points, and a variety of other broken tools. It’s dumb. I’ve made other tool rolls, notably in leather, but I wanted to make one that I thought could be replicated in a school MakerLab pretty easily with just fabric and some simple supplies like ribbon and bias tape. And I made this in a couple of hours, I’d say, making it up as I went. Pretty easy, and a reasonably competent sewer could make a replica in short order, I’m sure.
The design is pretty simple but I’m going to have to refine it further before it’s ready for prime-time to teach others how to sew. There is a pattern of sorts, in other words. But I’m going to have to refine it.
The essence of the design is two pieces of fabric, the same width but different lengths. One is folded around the other in such a way as to form a top ‘flap’ to protect the tools inside and keep them from flopping out; and a bottom ‘pocket’ to hold the tools in place. These two pieces of fabric are the red-with-yellow-stars fabric, and the solid blue. (The purple is bias tape, the ribbon is from the box of a fancy men’s store in New York City that I saved for this purpose when I got a gift; and the black-and-white floral print is left over from one of last week’s quilts. The result is a simple tool roll that holds just a few pens and pencils — enough to know that they work, that they’re good tools, and that they have a specific place to go. Not so many that they get lost or broken.
Even unrolled, the tool roll conceals its tool kit until the last minute. The blue fabric flips over the top in order to protect the equipment inside. When this is flipped open or flipped back, the simple collection of tools inside becomes visible. I think ultimately there should be room for 2-3 pencils, one of those blocky pencil-sharpeners with two shavers, a compass and a ruler, and 3-5 pens (black, blue, red, and maybe some other colors): enough to work with in an imaginative way, but not so much that it’s hard to keep track of. And when something is broken or missing, you know — you know because you, the kid who made this pencil case, know exactly how many tools are in it, should be in it, and where they go. That would be the idea.
So that’s the basics of the design: non-complicated, four pieces of fabric and a ribbon And the design teaches four basic skills, too: hemming, inside-out-and-turn construction, top stitching, bias tape use, cutting on a rotary mat with a quilting ruler, and layering of stitches. It’s not fool proof by any means, but it’s a sophisticated project for being such a small thing. I have to refine it, of course, but this is a great start. Yay!
