Handmade presents: the drawing book

I'm afraid I don't have any in progress photos of any of this next sequence of presents. They were thought up over a number of weeks, but made and wrapped fairly quickly, on a dull day, as the sun was setting, and so none of the photos are brilliant.

They also now belong to three rather small boys who live quite a long way away from me, so I won't get chance to photograph them again just yet... These three boys are my nephews, who I don't see half as often as I should. I wanted to make things they could use, play with, get dirty, share (or not), and that could generally withstand being in a house with three small boys.

For the eldest, who's nearly four, I made a paper and pencil book. This started life in my head as something along the lines of this crayon roll. I don't quite know where along the line it mutated and somehow merged with this gratitude wrap.

And, of course, somewhere further along the line it became something different altogether.

On the front is a tortoise. I like tortoises. This is a child's pillowcase I picked up months ago, with no specific idea what I'd do with it. I think it makes a cheery front cover :)

Inside (and again, apologies for the substandard photography...), is a heavy stripey cotton fabric, with two pockets, one for a pad of paper, and the other to hold pencils.

I'm not sure how many times I unpicked the stitching on this, but it was a lot. I'm not entirely sure why it caused me such trouble, I just couldn't get my head around what needed to be done first. Perhaps if I'd have followed some instructions? But I think you might be starting to get a general picture of what I think about following instructions...

So I scratched my head a lot, stitched on the binding, and since it was the first time I'd ever used binding, I unpicked the stitches, and stitched it on all over again. Twice. The pocket on the left, for the paper, is a piece of cotton pillow case, backed with a bit of the stripey heavy cotton to give it weight. The pocket on the right is red fleece, again backed by the stripey fabric, although I now think it would be better if this side hadn't been.

Both pockets have binding on, and both were sewn to the stripey fabric before I sewed the front cover on. Well, before I sewed the front cover on the second time, that is...

I think it went down well. It was opened, turned upside down, the pink pencil crayon held in the air and declared 'my favourite pencil', and a lovely drawing done on the first page :)