Pencil pods for kids!

by Linda Theil

It's not too early to start thinking about donations for the Livingston Educational Service Agency's annual Backpacks for Kids! project. July 30, 2026 is the deadline for donations; and local-district, free distribution is 4-6 PM on August 8, 2026. For more information check out the LESA Backpacks for Kids! web page.

Alisa has purchased ten back packs and all the required school supplies to fill them and I have made ten pencil-pods -- one for each backpack.

When I went looking through my stash for materials for this year's pencil pods, I found a lot of small scraps from a project I made last year using the "Hedgehog Hollow" collection by In the Beginning fabrics. You can read about that project on my blog post titled "Three pillows and a quilt".

Although the orts were small, the images are so beautiful I thought I would use the scraps to make as many pencil pods as I could eke from the leftovers.. My goal was to feature the beautiful animals and forest images in a simple pouch. For that reason I chose the Spencer-Ogg free "Cosmetics Pod" pattern for the beauty and simplicity of its design.

I had adapted the basic Cosmetics Pod previously to a size and shape to hold pencils, rulers, and other pencil-box equipment. You can read about the adaptation in my 2021 blog post titled "Pencil pods". This current adaptation uses an 11x11-inch piece of fabric to make a pencil pod of roughly 10x5-inches.

To use as much of the fabric images as possible, this year I further adapted the Spencil-Ogg pattern to accommodate the size, shape, and design of the fabric scraps available, resulting in a variety of pencil pod sizes and shapes.

For scraps smaller than the requisite 11x11-inches, I sewed an extra width of fabric to in a 7-inch-to-4-inch ratio that fits the design of the pattern. Below, you can see the pencil pod sewn from the fabric layout shown above. As you can see, the larger piece of fabric forms the back and front above the zipper; the top of the larger piece of fabric that forms the back of the bag, curls over and forms the top of the front; and for that reason will always appear upside down if the fabric is a directional print. I was fortunate that the directional print I used for the back had an empty blue sky at the top of the fabric piece, making the fact that it is upside down on the front insignificant. The smaller piece of fabric forms the front below the zipper of the pencil pod.

If the additional fabric piece is a directional fabric, it has to be sewn onto the bottom of the 7x11-inch piece upside down so that when the pouch is sewn together according to the pattern directions, the front and back of the pouch both appear right side up. If the added fabric is omni-directional -- as shown above -- the extra piece of fabric can be sewn on in either direction to the larger piece of fabric.

The bag with the large squirrel, pictured higher up in this post, is an example of a bag that had a directional fabric sewed upside down to the larger piece featuring the squirrel. Below is the image of the front of that squirrel bag as sewn.