Katie Alderson is admittedly handy. When Katie’s father gave her a Singer sewing machine for Christmas during the first year of lockdown, she was daunted but put it to work.
Lunch Bag
Katie cut up an Ikea canvas apron to create her first project: “After months of tossing food containers into a backpack, I decided to make a lunch bag to keep everything upright and avoid spills. The idea was to re-create the classic paper bag.” She sized the bag to hold a lidded glass container from Ikea’s 365+ series.
Katie began by creating a paper template and then tracing the shapes on canvas and cutting them out.
The handles were repurposed from the original apron: “it was long enough to use as is; I just cut it in two.” A wooden clothespin is the pleasingly simple final detail.
Katie made this combination makeup bag/toiletry kit while she was “in a phase during lockdown of making my own lip balms and soap.” She used raw artist’s canvas and a brass zipper, both sourced online “from Amazon or somewhere like it.”
Makeup Bag/Toiletry Kit
The trickiest part was putting in the zipper: “I took a long rectangular piece, hemmed the edges, cut a slit and hemmed those edges, then sewed the zipper in that window.
The finished bag is approximately 8 inches long, 4 inches tall, and 2.5 inches deep.
“I was commissioned by one of my artist friends to create a storage solution for his collection of paint brushes,” says Katie of this canvas roll.
Paintbrush Roll
“We decided to incorporate six compartments varying in size to hold both small and large brushes,” Katie tells us.
The roll is 23.6 inches long and 13.7 inches wide; it holds approximately 40 paintbrushes in a variety of sizes. Some other DIY sewing ideas we love: