There are people out there who are very good about purchasing their Christmas gifts all year long, carefully storing them until it's that wonderful time of the year.  It seems nice, because they'll never be overwhelmed, nor should they find themselves spending a small fortune all at once.  I am not one of those people.  After the holidays, I make it my New Year's resolution to start making my gifts in August and have everything done in a month.  The idea then is that I can just enjoy the holidays, instead of going through my usual holiday stress out.  Does it ever happen?  No.  In fact, stressing out seems like part of the tradition now.

This year, I found a  project that was fun and economical.  There's no stress in that.  I loved making this pouches for everyone's cell phone.  I was a little sly in telling people that I was looking to buy a new cell phone and curious to know what kind they had.  Once I knew the make and model, I looked online to find the dimensions so I knew what size to make each pouch.

I was also able to personalize each phone pouch to their own personal likes and style.  Each one that came together was unique for a particular person and each one that I worked on became my new favorite.  I had trouble giving these up as I wanted to keep them all for myself.  Fortunately, I was able to give them away as gifts and everyone got really excited about their own unique phone pouch.  It really was worth the effort and didn't seem like much effort at all.

I made these pouches out of felt, which brings us to the economical part.  The nice thing about felt is that you don't have to worry about it fraying, so they're wonderful for appliqueing and are extremely easy to work with.  The bad thing about craft felt is that they will tend to stretch over time and little felt balls will eventually appear.  (Be gone, felt balls!  No one likes you!)  If you want something a little more durable than craft felt, you can use wool felt.

Cutting out the pieces and hand sewing them was the most time consuming part.  Designs without a lot of detail seem to work the best, but you can layer the felt on top of each other to create more dimension to the design.