Embroidery Tool Kit

&Stitches tool kit competition

The folks at &Stitches are having a competition! And so here is a bit of my embroidery tool kit as my entry.

I made this needle book a few months ago, and I love it to death, wobbly binding and all:
needle book

I picked up some vintage upholstery samples at a flea market/antique show in Dayton maybe a year or two ago. I fell in love with the two fabrics I used in this, and I knew I wanted to make a needle book, but it took me a while to get around to it. This past winter I started using the sewing machine much more, and I finally made my needle book using the quilted needle case tutorial from Sew She Sews. (Totally off the subject, she also has a fantastic quilted baby bib tutorial. I made some for my niece and for a friend’s baby and they were very well received.)

The only thing I’d change about it if I were doing it over again (apart from the stitching on the binding, which was wobbly because I was just getting back into sewing at the time and was seriously out of practice) would be to add a second small pocket somewhere for scissors. I tend to have to fish around in the big pockets for them, and they like to slide out in my bag.

It usually looks like this inside, with floss bobbins and bits of patterns and notes and my daisy thimble, which makes me happy every time I look at it:

needle book - inside

But at the moment there’s been a full-scale invasion by an English paper piecing project. I’m making a mug rug partly as a smallish exercise in hand-stitching binding before I bind the quilt, and partly as an excuse to make something out of cute little hexagons since I really enjoyed the block in my sampler quilt where I learned that technique. This is what it looks like at the moment:

needle book with in-progress hexagon mug rug top

1 Comment

  1. anne
    April 19, 2013

    Love it. And, what a great size. I need to make something like this for all the stuff I keep or carry to work.

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