Bonjour tout le monde! I’m trying to get in to a French mood because in a mere few days we will be enjoying the snowy peaks of the French Mountains! Woohoo, Roll On Holiday! I have now entered into packing mode!

Last year I shared my Emergency Craft Kit with you, a collection of goodies to pack in your suitcase when you want to craft on the go. It worked well for our domestic trip but this time we are really stuck for room, so there was no way we would be able to take up valuable suitcase space with that much stuff. Plus, we wont have as much free time, so lets be reasonable. I had to get creative about what to bring. And I do love being creative…. 🙂

I remember seeing a post on the beautiful blog of Crafty Goddess Elizabeth Kartchner, where she had packed some crafty supplies for a road trip. I loved it, be sure to check it out. This was the inspiration for my (mini) Emergency Craft Kit! Let’s take a look at what i’ve got!

Mini Book

Elizabeth made a little book from kraft cardstock and her silhouette and it was adorable. I thought I would follow suit to see what I could come up with. From an A4 piece of card I made pages with word apertures, cut out using the BEBAS font. I love the way this font looks when you cut it out.

I too used the bind it all to bind all the pages together, but I mixed it up a little in two ways. Firstly I used black wire as well as silver wire for the bindings. This is a cool way to use up those offcuts when you use all but two or three prongs. Secondly I added some extra pages to the book: a piece of glitter card to go behind the cover page, a pocket page for ephemera and I also glued two pages together to create the last page in the book (with some washi tape behind the aperture) – this makes it more sturdy, and hopefully more voyage-friendly!

Supplies

As for supplies, I too wanted to bring some washi tape, small scissors and some tags and journaling cards. I also brought some offcuts of pattern paper from my scraps box.

For adhesive, I really wish that I had the small bottle of glossy accents but i’m not going to buy it just for this trip so instead I am bringing this white glue pen. It is basically PVA glue but is it super easy to dispense. I have wrapped some sticky tape around the lid to ensure no mishaps on our travels.

In regards to pens, I’ve got a standard black pen that I like to write with and a white gel pen. I have wrapped these up in some discarded craft packaging incase of ink spills. It pays to be careful!

I also took a little baggy and put in a sprinkling of embellishments: buttons, veneer shapes, chipboard shapes. In fact Piper spent about half an hour sorting these this afternoon, so these may also double up as an indoor play project with miss P. BONUS!

All together

To contain her bits and pieces, Elizabeth had a little fabric bag. I never even thought of doing something like that. I guess I would have worried about getting things crumpled, but throwing caution to the wind I figured I would give it a try. Its good to get outside your comfort box sometimes.

I took some fabric and cut two rectangles, and before sewing them together I wanted to decorate the front of my bag. For this I used felt letters from KI memories, spelling out ECK – Emergency Craft Kit of course!! The felt letters have a cardboard backing and are adhesive but I didn’t think the adhesive would endure the ride so I ran some stitches through them. I love how they turned out. Not sure who makes the felt heart, but I stitched this by hand onto the material.

A few minutes later I had a bag, and all it needed was a drawstring – seam binding worked great for this! TA-DA!

NOW, if only I could get back to that packing!!

Here’s the rest of the pages in the mini book! Enjoy! x

Do you like it? Its a trash bag for the car!

You see, I am a self confessed messy car owner. In fact, my husband would say I am a messy car creator! He is always going on about how my car is full of rubbish. Meh. It doesnt bother me at all. The car is a way to get from A to B, its not like i have an emotional attachment to it. In a bid to try to at least appear more concerned, (and to avoid eye rolls from the hubs) I decided to address the situation. You see, the mess is mostly tissues or receipts or the odd choccy wrapper – just one or two of course. By no means would there ever be a situation where there were several strewn all over the car, evidence of a particularly tough week at work! ahem!

Remember my toy storage box that i made from denim? Well i had so much fun playing with an old pair of Craig’s jeans that i thought i would pull out the remains of denim from the fabric scraps drawer.

The main part of the bag is made using the leg of the jeans, with a square of denim sewn in as a base. I then lined it using this bright funky material. The hardest bit was adding that little tab – there were so many layers of denim that the stitches were a bit wonky at times. I think i need to invest in a thicker needle that will manage denim at bit better.

To use the bin, I have added a zip lock sandwich bag as a liner, so if there is any icky mess it wont damage or stink up the fabric.

While i was happily crafting, i decided to make something to hold some tissues. It makes me cringe when I have bambino in the car then I hear a sneeze from the back seat and there is no tissues within reach! ick!

I made this so it would hold a roll of toilet paper. I removed the inner cardboard tube and then pulled out the tissue from the inside of the roll. Once again the main part of the project was made using denim from a leg of jeans, but with trim at the top. Using this patterned paper I made a drawstring feature so it could gather the fabric up together at the top, but there was also a hole to feed through the tissue.

To make it pretty, I added a fabric flower and a button too.

So now the question is: will my car stay clean? Well, that would be telling wouldn’t it!!