 Hi you guys! Do I have a fun little tutorial project for us today? As some of you may know, I am going to be doing some traveling this summer. So excited about that. One of the trips I'm going to be taking is down the east coast of Florida. Kind of taking a little pit stop to Bimini Bahamas and then coming back up. Free Spirit just came out with this brand new collection called Treasure Island and it is seriously so adorable. As soon as I saw it, I knew that I was going to be wanting to make something for my upcoming trip to Florida. I mean the sand dollars, the parrots, the butterflies, the coral reefs, all of the sea creatures, all of the sea florals are just screaming Florida. The colors are super bright and super vibrant and I am so excited to make something with the sand dollar fabric. And I had the fun idea to make some like travel accessories and the first one that I'm going to be working on today is a curling iron or a flat iron holder. So the tutorial I'm going to be showing you today is actually based off of instructions that are available through Sew It Yourself. If you're not familiar, S-I-Y Sew It Yourself is a free resource for all of us. They have tons, like dozens and dozens of free projects for us to make. A lot of home decor, a lot of fun little craft projects that they want like this one that I'm making today and they're all completely free for us to use. So I've taken the curling iron holder pattern and instructions that they have on their website and today I'm going to be making a video tutorial to compliment that. So without further ado, let's head to the cutting table where I can walk you through the materials that we're going to need and the steps to make our curling iron holder. Okay, so for this project you need your main fabric. You need batting and you need some kind of insulating fabric that is going to prevent the curling iron from actually burning anything. This is ironing board cover so I know that it's going to be able to absorb the heat. If it's good enough for an iron, it's good enough for a curling iron and then you're also going to need some binding fabric. This is going to go around the perimeter of our curling iron holder so it will be seen from the right side. The first step of the instructions tutorial is to quilt your main fabric to your batting like so but because I'm using the ironing board cover that already has a quilting pattern on it, instead of marking all my lines and drawing on my fabric and doing all that measuring, I'm just going to use, I'm going to cheat and use the grid lines that are already on the insulation. So what we need to do is this goes right side down and then your batting and your fabric go on top of that like so. This square is roughly 14 inches by 11 inches. It does not have to be exact because we're going to end up cutting this down and doing curved corners anyways. But you just want to give yourself a little bit, a few extra inches on each side in the event that there is any shrinkage whenever we go to our sewing machines and mimic all of these grid lines here to get our quilting on the right side of our fabric. So I don't know about you but every single time I quilt something it just infinitely makes it look so much cuter. I just love it so much. So some tips for quilting though. If you have a walking foot, be sure to put that on your sewing machine that will help keep all the layers kind of moving through the machine at the same time. And then I also alternated the direction in which the fabric went through the machine. So I started in the middle. I did one big long stitch here and then I turned my fabric and then put that side through the machine this way and then this way and then this way and then went back to the other side and did the same thing and then on this diagonal again did one long straight stitch then put it through the machine this way then this way and again that just kind of like you know the fabric is going to shift then the next stitch is going to make it shift the other way. I also did a nice big basting stitch. This is not something that's going to like keep your whole project together so having a longer stitch I think is prettier and also you know really makes that the thread like really kind of stand out in some of these parts where it's contrasting. So we have that here. Our next step is to cut this down to 12 by 9. So easy enough we are going to take our clear ruler. We're going to measure this down to 12 by 9 and then you're going to take either a bowl or cup or any kind of rounded tool that you have and you're going to make your rounded corners and you're going to have four rounded corners on a long skinny rectangular piece. Well and that is the meat of our ironing curling iron holder. So now we need to bind this thing and then we're going to fold it in half and stitch around this whole thing and make like a little pocket. It's really so simple very straightforward. This project would be perfect for like bridesmaids gifts or like a family reunion type party anything that you have going on like that. So I just need to cut a good length of this binding fabric obviously feel free to buy the purchase binding from the fabric store but it's also so fun just to kind of make your own. Super simple to do no big deal and it's a lot more affordable especially if you're going to be cranking out a whole bunch of these. So I have all my raw edges lined up here. I am going to be making a one inch binding. All right now you are going to go to your machine and you are going to apply this binding around this entire edge sewing it right sides together at a quarter of an inch seam allowance and turning the whole thing to the inside like so. Okay could she be any cuter? I don't think so. All right we are at our last step here and for reference I ended up using the 44 inch length of the binding fabric and that was just enough to get all the way around mine. I had this much fabric left over. Another tip for the curves if you're having trouble getting your curves to lay nice and flat cut your ironing pad holder or curling iron holder cut the rounded edges more fat. So instead of like a narrow curve cut a fatter curve and it'll be easier for you to get around. But our last step is to fold this little guy in half like so you're going to want to grab some pins because we're going to be sewing through all the layers. We want to take the folded edge put that on a straight line and then we're going to measure three inches down from this point here one two three and then our stitch is going to start right here. You can also use binding clips if that is easier for you but start roughly three inches down and you're going to sew all the way down here either stitch in the ditch or stitch along this binding stitch that you just made all the way around the bottom of our holder and that's what's going to create the little pouch for you to put your curling iron in and it is just that easy for you to sew a little pouch to hold your curling iron or your straightener or any hot hair tool that you have while you are traveling. Didn't she turn out so cute? I could really see you adorning this a good jillion different ways whether you have a cricket and you want to do like monograms or you want to do like the year and the place that you're traveling to you could even do instead of bias binding or instead of binding on the edge you can even do some kind of trim like if you wanted to do pom-poms would be super cute if you've got like a teenager-y type of thing coming up. The possibilities are truly endless with this super simple project. Be sure to check out the description box. I will have a link to this fabric collection. Again all of the fabrics in the collection, the Treasure Island collection are stunning. The colors are super super bright. I also have the link for you to SIY Sew It Yourself to the entire list of their free projects for you to download and then this specific project is also linked in the description box as well. So I hope that you will check it out and that you will make a curling iron holder for yourself. Go make one of these. They're so cute. I will see you all very soon. Bye!