Pattern plotting

Cardboard, scissors, ruler, pen and old khakis...my pattern-making kit. The ruler is occasionally optional.

My pattern-making skills are pretty limited. I can design things, like this piece, off the top of my head, usually through a lot of trial-and-error, but working from a pattern is incredibly challenging for me. Making the pattern myself to work from? Quite impossible, as the piles of abandoned projects and cardboard can attest.

So far, at least.

I'm starting work this week on a new product line that I'm planning on selling at the craft sales I'm (*hopefully*) in this fall. I've searched the web high and low for a needlebook/case pattern that I like enough to use as inspiration, but haven't found anything that grabs my attention. Sure, there are lots of cute ones out there (like this one, or this one, both found on Etsy), and I certainly wouldn't turn them down if I was given either of them as a gift, but they aren't quite what I want. So I'm making my own.

I've decided to make three different sizes - two will be more for travel sewing kits or for people who like to embroider on the go, and the larger one will be for more of a central deposit, for lack of a better term, for all your needles and some pins and maybe a pocket for some bits of thread and things. Like a lot of other needlebook creators, I'll be embroidering the outsides of mine with little decorations and designs, something I need to get working on today.

I've got a lot of scrap material that I'll likely never use for anything to sell (like scrub pants from my mom and old khakis from Keith) that should be perfect for tweaking the patterns I've come up with. I don't want to go into this new line without having perfected it as much as possible... time is short as it is and I can't be wasting more of it ripping out threads or sewing up pieces that just won't work anyway.

I'll post pics of some of the completed works before I head off to the craft sales this fall. Depending on how they turn out and how many I can produce in 30 days, I may even put a couple up in one of my shops (more on that later, I promise...). Because everyone needs a needlebook to keep track of their needles so they don't end up stuck in the carpet, lost until someone steps on it in the middle of the night, barefoot.