A Gift a Day Gift Twenty: An Art Kit

When it came to a few of my nephews I got completely stumped on what to get for them.  My one nephew  is in preschool, so I thought that something cool to give to him might be an art kit.  My mother-in-law was telling me how much he loved school, so I thought this would be a nice way to bring school a little closer to home.

He does have two younger brother's though, so I wanted to give him something he could keep his art supplies in.  So, I decided to try my hand at making a zippered pouch for the first time.  I was actually quite pleased with how it turned out, especially for a first attempt :).

I found a small canvas (I love these things as they are mounted on heavy cardboard and are made for mixed medium, so it's easy to find a frame to fit them, unlike the stretched canvas and they are fun to work with because they are so versatile) at one of the thrift stores a while back for .10.  I had been thinking, MAYBE that I'd get some time to paint again someday (a hobby I used to enjoy), but yeah...what was I thinking, I'm a parent *laugh*.  So, I decided to include that so he had a platform to make something cool for his parents to frame.

Don't have canvas for something like this?  Why not stack up some computer/printer paper?  Kids love to draw and I doubt they'd care what you gave them to draw on.

I then made a zippered pouch for his things in light blue.  The blue fabric is actually some scrap left over from making my son's birthday quilt and pillow sham and it worked fabulous for this project.  I picked that color primarily because I had a zipper to match in my zipper stock.

The art supplies themselves I've had for a while as I raided Target a couple of years back when their school supplies went on clearance super cheap (.08 boxes of crayons, .04 glue sticks, that type of thing) and while my stock is getting kind of small anymore after a few years of raiding it for my daughter's stocking stuffers and birthday gifts, as well as for the aforementioned school supplies, I had enough to put this together.

Total Cost to Make Gift:  About 1.00 with the original cost of the school supplies, the zipper and the canvas.

Total Time to Make Gift:  About 45 minutes to make the zippered pouch and about 2 hours trying to figure out what "safe" place I had put the canvas so my kids didn't do anything to it *laugh*.