Back to school pencil case

My big girl started the new school year today, her first day in Year 2, with her first wobbly tooth and a new pencil case.

When she told me on the weekend that she needed the pencil case, of course I saw a crafting opportunity, and was pleasantly surprised when she chose this groovy Ikea stripe fabric over some more obvious girly prints.



I made it the same way I make my lined zip purses (tutorial coming soon - I promise!) but on a larger scale, adding some heavy iron-on interfacing to make it extra sturdy and a heavy duty jacket zip.



Then, because I'm a sook and like her to have a little extra touch of love from me to take with her, I embroidered her name onto a piece of cotton ribbon and made a zipper pull out of it. She was happy with it and then took me on a stationery shopping trip to fill it up. Do you remember the excitement of getting a new set of pencils?

But the real point to this post was to try out my new camera! I was lucky enough to get a digital SLR for Christmas and finally I've had a chance to play with it. I need to do LOTS of reading and playing around with it (it's a while since I've had an SLR) but even just playing around with the macro function and using it on the automatic setting is great, it takes such fabulous shots. Below is one of my big girl, wobbly tooth and all. It was late afternoon when I took these shots and the camera's dealt with the low light really well, something my old snappy wasn't built for.