Fabric Trays and Card Wallets

You guys. Seriously. Pinterest is addicting, and there are so many good ideas out there. This weekend I made two easy sewing projects.

First up, two fabric trays. Here’s the tutorial, and here’s what mine look like! I made the big one first, and it’s the same size as the large tray in the tutorial — the perfect size to hold some magazines on a coffee table. After I’d made one and understood the process, I made a second, smaller tray to hold coupons and other miscellaneous items that are usually cluttering the sofa table next to my purse.

I rearranged a couple of the tutorial steps the second time around. The tutorial tells you to iron on the fusible interfacing that stiffens the bottom of the tray before you sew the layers together, but that made it tough to turn the whole thing inside out once it was sewn together — because it was so stiff from the interfacing. So the second time around to make the construction a little easier, I didn’t add the interfacing until I’d already turned the layers right-side-out. I had to leave one side almost entirely open so that I could then insert the interfacing, but that’s not a big deal since you topstitch around all the edges anyway.

I don’t know if that makes sense or not, but if you end up making one of these, let me know and I’ll try to explain it more clearly.

I also made a cute card wallet to hold all of my store loyalty cards — you know, those “buy-9-burritos-get-the-10th-burrito-free” cards you get everywhere you go. They clutter my real wallet, so months ago I put them in a cheap plastic wallet in the car, but the plastic was already starting to fall apart. (Not to mention that the cards stuck to the plastic. Annoying.)

Here’s what mine looked like! Pretty darn good, if I do say so myself. I was kind of on a roll while cutting the fabric for these, so I made four of them. (I bought fat quarters of fabric, and even after making 4 of them, I had enough fabric left to make probably 8-10 more.)

I don’t know what I’m going to do with the other three, so if you want one — and you don’t mind if the sewing isn’t totally perfect — let me know and it’s all yours!