When life gives you lemons. . . make pouches

My sewing machine is malfunctioning!  None of the stitch controls are working; it turns on, but only does a straight stitch, the default setting.  I knew when I bought a computerized machine that one day the keypad and electronic controls would stop working.

While I was in straight-stitch-only mode, I had to put down the pants I was working on, but I really felt like making something, so I made two little box pouches using the tutorial here.



The tutorial is not perfect; the instructions are a bit vague, like where it says to "stitch the layers together," omitting the fact that you only need to do this along one long edge.  But how much detail do you need?  It's so simple.  And the pouches are cute.  On the one with chickens printed on it, I added a little twill tape loop to aid in pulling the zipper.  The fabrics are fat quarters from Jo-Ann.

Now to figure out where to scrape up the change for sewing machine repairs.  Either that, or figure out some more straight-stitch-only projects to do.