Juice Pouches, A Tutorial, and a Thanksgiving Snapshot

Yesterday I cleaned over 100 juice pouches.  When I say cleaned, I mean the sticky straw part on the outside.  The insides are cleaned asap in my home.

As promised, I am going to show how I make juice pouch change purses.  First you sew the zipper on one side of one pouch.  Then you line up the pouches along the zipper and sew a 2nd pouch to the other half of the zipper.

Next I zip it half way.  Then I match up the 2 pouches and sew around the 3 remaining sides.

I tuck in the tail of the zipper on one side.  As I sew, I catch the tail so that it is hidden and doesn't get in the way.

Its that easy to make a change purse.  I made 4 yesterday.

Here are 3 bags in progress.  All of them are Christmas gifts.

Here is a big present for myself.  I love my large juice pouch tote bag, so I decided to make myself another one.  The inspiration for this came from my husband telling me to relax, take it easy, and only craft for myself for a week.  I still need to clean more juice pouches before I can assemble this bag.

Here is the smaller tote bag that I made for myself yesterday.  I bought the ribbon a long time ago with a lemonade juice pouch bag in mind.  The ribbon has lemons on it and say lemon meringue. 

Now here is when a mistake turns into a happy accident.  I sewed in the pocket upside down.  Looking on the bright side, the slits that I make when cleaning the inside of the pouches will make great pencil pockets in addition to the deeper pocket.  My husband was funny, he said something about marking it as half priced.  Thank goodness its for me. 

This picture and the next one were taken at 4 p.m. today (as part of the snapshots of life link party).  I was cleaning my craft area in the basement at this time.  I got that green siamese twin notebook last year for Christmas.  It was made from a hardback book.  I thought that this book really represented me today.  I'm a Gemini, which is represented by twins.  My evil twin showed itself today, because every time I turned around my 3 year old was reeking havoc and testing my patience.  It started with the mischief that he got into while everyone else was asleep (with a whole bottle of glue). Ok, so maybe my evil twin wasn't really evil, just the side of me that has less patience than normal.  So to take a break from it all, I put on my headphones, went into the basement, and cleaned.  Its still very messy (I refuse to show how messy here), but at least I made a dent.  

I thought that today would have been a very relaxing Thanksgiving, but instead I was putting out toddler fires.  That being said, it was nice cooking a simple meal that everyone loved, putting my youngest to bed early, and watching a movie with my oldest son and my husband with my cat sleeping on my lap.  I hope that all of you had a nice and relaxing Thanksgiving.