Quick and Cute

My sister-in-law asked for a travel sewing kit for Christmas and I just happened to draw her name for stockings. I snagged a little kit for a dollar at Dollarama but it was absolutely hideous so I spent five minutes with my friend Google and found a fantastic little tutorial here for turning a candy tin into a sewing kit.

Of course it wasn't until Christmas eve morning that I finally got around to pulling the kit together and I only had one tin on hand (thank you, Mom) so I decided to take the safe route and leave the outside alone. Thankfully Sarah likes tea, and well... hopefully she likes bears in pajamas too.

I'm going to keep my eyes peeled for tins in thrift shops from now on, I'd like to experiment with scrapbook paper and mod podge on the outside: so many possibilities.

This is how the inside of the tin turned out. I was tempted to keep it for myself BUT that would be selfish and not very Merry of me.

I had a moment of panic when I realized I should have purchased bobbins for the thread because the little spools from the dollar store were too tall to fit in the tin BUT I improvised and used little pieces of cardboard with tiny slits cut in them to wrap the thread around - this worked out really well and in retrospect I should have included a few 'blank' cards for Sarah. Swapping the thread from the spools to the cardboard was what took the most time for this project. I was finished the tin in under 15 minutes and what took the longest was removing and resizing the pin cushion after I had already glued it in. If you make one I would suggest making the pin cushion shorter than I did - even after I took it all apart to cut it down a little it still caused the lid to stick a little when opening and closing.

Let me know if you end up making one of these puppies, especially if you mess with the outside. I'm curious to see what you come up with!