If you don’t have school-age kids you might not realize how dramatically the school supply lists have changed at least since I was a kid. It’s not just #2 pencils anymore — and by the way, my sympathies if some well-intentioned person at your child’s school has decided to sell “Smencils” as a fundraiser. Smencils are what happens when you cross a pencils with a car air freshener. You get a scented pencil and then you get a headache.

I digress. Anyway, there’s all this technology stuff on the list like headphones for computer classes and flash drives. Manufacturers of flash drives had figured this out and started making cute ones like our daughter’s panda flash drive. But this stuff is expensive and can easily go missing. And I would give a million dollars (note: I don’t have a million dollars actually but if I did…) to the first person who comes up with headphones that don’t tangle.

So our daughter who has been raised in part by Mr. Everything-in-the-entire-world-needs-it’s-own-drawstring-bag-for storage, asked, not surprisingly, to make a storage bag for the school supplies like the headphones and flash drive that would be better off not commingled with pencil shavings in her pencil box.

She wanted a zippered pouch and wanted to make it all by herself. We have a gigantic bag of miscellaneous zippers (about the size of a bag of potatoes) that I bought at a thrift store for $5 and she had already spotted the neon pink zipper before she even mentioned the project to me. She decided on a 5″x6″ pouch because her teacher likes flash drives kept on lanyards so between that and the headphones, she wanted not to have to jam things in.

She pinked the edges but used no batting or lining. Super simple. Sew each side of the zipper to the top edges of the pouch, then sew up the sides.

Our zipper was too long so she dropped her feed dogs, and did a superwide zigzag in place to make a bar tack over the desired end of the zipper. Then we cut off the extra end.

Made entirely by a 10-yr-old in 10 minutes. That’s an education in itself.