A Gift a Day Gift Seventeen: A Sewing Kit

One of my goals for my daughter this year was to gift her some things that would, hopefully, get her interested in domestic arts more.  So, I decided a small kit for sewing and embroidery was in order.

I decided to take a scrap from the very small amount of material I had left from the fancy quilt to make a  small needle book (a pillow, a tea cozy with coasters and a needle book out of one baby quilt.  I think the previous owner would be proud).  I took some bias tape that was a color I don't use very often (I pick packages up for .10 at the used store whenever I run into them) to make the border around the book (and re-secure the three layers of course).   Some pink lace hem tape helped to dress up the bias tape binding.  I then took some white felt and made some pages for the book, using pinking shears on the edges to dress it up a bit.

For the fastener I sewed a button that was one of a huge amount of buttons my step mom sent me.  I would have used white elastic vs black here, but I didn't have any white in the appropriate size to work well for the button fastener and I didn't have the money to hop out and buy some right now.

The rest of the kit consists of a seam ripper (the one in the picture is a stand in.  I finally found a smaller seam ripper with a lid, which I couldn't find when I first put the kit together), a needle threader, embroidery scissors (yes, these are indeed the ones I bought for myself.  I didn't have the money to buy my daughter her own set, so I found a small pair of utility scissors to use for myself and gave her the ones I had bought), some buttons and a couple of colors of embroidery floss.

I'm going to tie the small embroidery hoop onto the front of the kit with a ribbon before putting it in the box.

The zippered container was one of the finds we got at the used store with pocket change.  My husband found it for .75.  I believe it's an old manicure set holder, but with all the elastic holding pieces, all it took was a seam ripper in a few places and it worked fabulously for it's new purpose (and it's silver and sparkly.  My daughter will like that part).  The embroidery hoop was also .50.

Total Cost to Make Gift:  5.25 between the cost of the embroidery scissors, the case and the embroidery hoop.

Total Time To Make Gift:  About 1 hour.