Roll It Up

I needed a really good birthday present for friend J, and she had recently posted about a colored pencil roll she'd found online at PinkChalkStudio. I guess this is also in the book "Last Minute Quilted Gifts."
Luckily the blog post had some directions (not exact, but enough to get me going). The first step was cutting strips in each color. This was made to fit the Prismacolor 24 set. That was the most time-consuming part of this project! Pulling out the red box. Then the orange box. etc... as we march through the rainbow.
After that it went pretty fast. Sewing the colored strips together, finding a good fabric for the pocket (I used a thick woven cotton, almost to a light canvas. That was folded in half and basted along the sides and bottom. The filling was flannel so that the roll would roll up small enough. I chose some fabrics for the outside of the roll, right sides together, with the ribbon tie basted on one end.
After sewing around the outside, then turning to right sides, I did some pressing. Then the stitching in the ditch between each color, over the pocket to make the holder for each pencil.
This ribbon started out as just a boring white one, but I had this really thin trim that I thought tied in (haha) really well with the fabric I'd chosen for the outside of the roll. I sewed that on with clear thread.
Tada, voila', fini',done! And I'm happy to report that she really liked it!
And it turned out that I read the notes I'd made on assembly wrong and had thus cut the colored strips twice as long as I needed. So now I have one that I can assemble for me. Haha, I love "mistakes" like that, wonder if I really really wanted one subconsciously and thus changed the number around in my conscious brain.