Patchwork Please Teabag Pouch

I finally got a copy of Patchwork Please! by Ayumi Takahashi through my library... I put in a request for it over a month ago when I found out about the Zakka Along going on over at Flickr.  We didn't own a copy, so I had to request it through our interlibrary loan department and it took a while.  The book is chock full of adorable projects, hop on over to the Flickr group to check out what people have made so far.  I can't wait to make that pincushion on the front :)

I decided to start with the teabag pouch because I needed a "surprise" for a penpal swap I was participating in, and my partner said she liked tea.  I hope she enjoys it as much as I enjoyed making it!

Since I am totally on a FMF kick right now, I thought that using some of my scraps from my table runner would be a good start... but I needed a solid and more neutral fabric, and interfacing, so I needed to find time last week to run to Joann's.  It was Friday before I got a chance to go out there. 

I grabbed some Kona in Canary (I think) for the pocket lining, and some of the new light blue dots from DS's Blossom Reel line (I really need to get some of every print in that line!).  I also got some fusible medium weight apparel interfacing because that's what "felt" right... I know nothing about interfacing, so if someone has a good tutorial or guide to interfacing I'd appreciate a link :)

While I love the projects in this book, the instructions were really difficult to follow because there are NO diagrams.  I am a very visual person when it comes to instructions, so just having them only in text was hard for me.  I found myself reading each step several times before actually doing that step... and I still had to rip apart the pockets twice!  After getting the pockets attached, I just gave up reading the instructions and did what looked right.

You can see my little error at the top corner of the pockets because I snipped the wrong corners when turning them right-side out... whoops!

Honestly, I'm not even sure I did it correctly because I just kinda went with how I thought it was supposed to be done based on the pictures in the book.  Despite maybe not following the directions completely, I'm really pleased with how it turned out.  It's a super cute project, and sewed up really quickly once I actually got to sewing and not reading.

Sewing the button on was a little bit of a pain, maybe I was supposed to do that before I sewed the pieces together, but like I said, after attaching the pockets and fusing the interfacing, I didn't really follow the directions :p  I also top-stitched around it because I saw someone else did that and I liked how it looked :)