It’s a snap!

Well, a snap tray anyway….  If you’ve spent any time at all hanging out with needlepointers, you’ll have heard of a snap tray.  If you haven’t, then I’ll introduce you to a handy little needlework tool.

Here’s what I made a couple of days ago:



This is called a snap tray and it’s a really handy thing for anyone who travels with their needlework.  Have you ever been someplace (like a classroom, someone’s house, sitting on the beach, etc…..) and managed to scatter your needlework supplies (like my scissors currently reclining in the snap tray) over hither and yon?  Well, a snap tray is a handy little accessory to corral all the little bits of flotsam and jetsam.  And the bonus part is that it will lay flat when you’re not actually using it!  See, like this:



I can also see myself using one of these just when I’m staying away from home – when I take off my rings, watch, glasses, etc. I’d have a safe place to keep them all.

Nifty, eh?  (sorry, my Canadian is showing!)

This was very simple to make (and I’m sure Heather recognizes the fabrics!) from this free tutorial I found online (you have to sign up for an account, but it’s free).  It took me longer to hand sew on the snaps then it did to sew it all together.  And one of the sets of snaps is a little, ahem, over-exuberant and doesn’t want to come apart once it’s put together.  Perhaps I need slightly higher quality snaps, but anyway….. It would be very, very easy to scale this up or down to make it larger or smaller.

If sewing isn’t your thing, my friend Jane posted a bunch of links to different snap trays that are available.  It was her post that got me remembering the free tutorial and finally got me to get off my duff and sew one.  So, thanks Jane (Jane’s blog is also the most amazing needlepoint resource for anything and everything – go read it – the inspiration is endless there!)!  I’m tempted to make a frame weight too, or I may take a page from a friend’s book and buy myself a stuffed animal to disembowel and re-fill with glass beads or something heavy.  We’ll see where that goes!

The CreativFestival starts in less than a week!  Can’t wait to catch up with my friends and play with fabrics and fibres for 5 whole days.