The Make-Up Brush Roll

How to Make One

I've made several of these now, and I thought that I would share with you how they are made. They're very quick and easy to make and take very little fabric. You could also play with the dimensions and make a roll for knitting needles, crochet hooks or whatever. I actually made two similar ones for my husband's wrenches a long time ago in denim with velcro closures; one for English sizes and one for metric.

Materials:
Two different fabrics, either 1/2 yard of each or 1 fat quarter of each. (this project is perfect for fat quarters!)
1 piece of medium weight fusible interfacing, 14"x16"
1 yard of ribbon, cut into 2 lengths of 18" each

Instructions:
1. Cut one fabric into a rectangle, 14"x16", this will become the outside of the roll. Cut the other fabric into a rectangle 15"x17", this will become the inside of the roll.

2. Fuse the interfacing to the smaller (outside) rectangle.

3. Layer the two fabrics as show below, with the inside fabric on the bottom *wrong* side up, then the outer fabric on top *right* side up. Center the smaller rectangle over the larger one, so that there is 1/2" border of the bottom fabric showing on all sides of the top fabric.

4. Form the self binding on the short sides by turning the edges of the short sides of the bottom fabric into meet the edge of the top fabric and then turning in the folded edge one more time to form a 1/4" border. Stitch close to the first fold through all layers to secure binding.

Before turning:
Bringing raw edge of bottom layer to raw edge of top layer:

(See photos below for finished edges - I forgot to get a close-up of that!)

5. Form the self binding on the long sides, by turning and stitching the edges the same way, but along the left edge, add a ribbon tie by inserting the edges of the ribbon into the last fold before stitching. The ribbon should be placed 8" above the bottom of the short edge. You can see in the photo below that I've pinned the ribbons in place before top stitching.

6. Turn up the bottom short edge 3" and stitch in place along top stitching at right and left sides. This forms the pocket.

7. Divide the pocket into sections, mark and stitch on the marked lines from top edge of pocket to the bottom. The size of the sections will depend on what you're putting into them. For make-up brushes, I generally do 4 sections of 2" each and then divide the remaining pocket into 1" sections.

8. You're done! Fold the top edge down to meet the top of the pocket, roll and enjoy.

Note: If you don't want to do the self binding and you have a serger, you could do some decorative serging around all the edges to finish them. In this case, you'll need to cut the front and back the same size and stitch the ribbons on after serging the edges.

Parting Shot: Pattern for another large project. I got this one on eBay because I needed a vest pattern for my next project, Forget Me Knot, which will be started after I finish Midnight Garden. As a side note, this is a 3 piece wardrobe pattern, too!