Car Roll-up Caddy

I have made a couple crayon rolls before and they were easy enough. So I wanted to see if I could modify that design to make a little roll-up caddy for little toy cars. I knew I wanted to make the top 'flap' long enough to sew on a road for the boys to drive the cars on, so after some thinking, here is how it turned out...




Want to make one yourself? Well, here an amazingly long tutorial to show how I did it. (this might be hard to explain so bear with me!!)

Supplies you need: coordinating fabric, material for your road (I used an old black t-shirt, but you could use felt), ribbon, marking pen and fusible stuff like Wonder Under or Pellon. If you are anything like me, you will also need a seem ripper. :)

1. Cut your coordinating material. I used 4 small matchbox cars, so I decided to make one piece 7x6 inches and the long piece for the road was 7x34 inches. {However, if I did this again, I would make the pieces 8x6 and 8x34 because it ended up being too narrow for the cars}.



2. Fold each piece in half, wrong sides together, so that they are now 7x3 and 7x17. Iron to make a nice crease at the fold.



3. Time to make the road. To do this, I used an old black t-shirt, cut out the curve, and followed the instructions that came with my Wonder Under to fuse and iron onto the long piece of material. Then I unfolded the material and sewed around the edges of the road. (If you don't unfold the material, then you will see the stiching of the road on the final product which will look UGLY!!).





Then I repeated the process with yellow material to make the stripes on the road. I did a quick zig zag stick down the middle of each stripe after ironing onto the road just to make sure the stripes don't start peeling off.





4. Take your shorter piece of material and sew along the folded edge. This will just make a nice, neat edge on the pocket.



5. Keeping the longer piece of material unfolded, pin the shorter piece to the bottom of the longer piece, lining up the edges. Sew around the three sides of the shorter material, leaving the top open for the cars to slide in.



6. Here is the tricky part. Well, if you are smarter than me, it may not be tricky. You need to mark off where you want to sew to make individual pouches. I took my space and divided it into four sections, since I was going to put 4 cars into the pouches. Using my marking pen, I marked where I wanted to sew those lines. It ended up being around every 1.5 inches. Like I said before, it ended up being too narrow so you will have to play with your measurements depending on the width of your material and how big the items are that you are putting into each pouch.



Once your material is marked, sew vertical lines without going past the edge or your shorter material. This will create the individual pouches.

7. Pin two pieces of ribbon to the center of the edge of your material.




8. Take your super long piece of material and fold it over so that the right sides of the material are togther. Kind of like making a sandwich around the pockets you just made. Make sure the ribbon is tucked in nice and neat.



9. Pin around the edges, leaving a hole to turn the caddy right side out.

10. Sew around the edges, starting here (sewing towards the left in the picture)...



and ending here...



11. Turn right side out, iron, and then pin the opening. Top stitch around the entire caddy, making sure to close the hole as you sew.

12. At this point, now that the entire project was done, I realized my cars wouldn't fit into the individual pouches. I had to walk away a minute because I was about to be upset that this hour long project was wasted. Then I just decided to improvise and I ripped out the stitching on the pouches to make two big pouches instead of four little ones. The cars then fit perfectly and my quick thinking saved the day! yeah!!




So this project wasn't terribly difficult and turned out cute. I would say it took about an hour or so, which isn't that long considering I had to think about how to make it without directions. Hope the directions make sense for anyone who is wanting to make one. Let me know if you have questions or if I need some major edits to my directions!