It’s that time of the year. Time to think about GIFTS! I usually try to pull together several handmade hostess gifts for the holiday festivities. This year there won’t be a lot of celebrating in groups but I still plan to reach out to my friends and family and send small tokens telling them that they are cared for and missed.

I started working on these little gifts a few weeks ago. The first idea came from this easy peasy pouch tutorial I made over two years ago. I use this pouch in my favorite Handy Tote and I find it to be indispensable. It hangs there on the hook in the tote and holds small important items that I want to get to fast!

Another nice thing about making these pouches is that they are “scrap busters”. I can use up some of my smaller pieces from my stash.

For instance, I only had a wee piece of this canvas fabric from Rifle Paper Company left from making MANY different projects and knew that I could make use of it in a smaller pouch based on my easy-peasy pouch tutorial. I just had to change up the sizes.

A little problem is that the fabric is “one-way” and I don’t want the flowers standing on their heads so I cut each part separately then stitched it back together.

When slicing and dicing and re-stitching, I had to make sure the 1/4″ seam allowances were added to the calculations.

Sometimes I put a little something in the pouch. This one is going to a friend that wants an orange cat.

For the closure, I prefer to use either these magnetic snaps as in the above pouch or Kam snaps that you can check out in the following two pics.

Kam Snaps are easier but if you make a mistake, It’s next to impossible to remove the snap.

Once I started making the pouches, I couldn’t stop! Here are three different sizes.

And the surprises in three of them….

All the pouches are on the way to their new homes!