Images of a case for reading glasses, handmade, with sashiko-inspired embroidery as decoration. Let’s make Christmas gifts for each other, he suggested, and I immediately said Yeah! And then my mind started to spin. What to make? What would be something ‘me’ but all the while, not something so ‘obviously me’ that it wouldn’t be a surprise?

Settling on making a case for his reading glasses, which actually was a thought I’d had ever since the summer without acting on it, I then had to figure out the How of it. How to make a case, that I could embellish with some sashiko-inspired patterns, while at the same time providing some type of protection for the glasses?

Pondering what materials I could use, I settled on creating a pocket, of sorts, with denim on the outside that I could decorate, and a liner made from an old sheet on the inside, with a harder material in between these two layers of fabric.

Then the prototyping really commenced. I needed something hard enough to provide protection for the glasses, but pliable enough to be formed into a case.

Pondering, and musing, I set my eyes on cutting into tubs of Greek yoghurt, and it sort of, kind of, worked… only to snap and break where I didn’t want it to break. Continued to ponder and muse, digging through shelves of might-come-in-hand-some-day stuff in the basement, looking for something without quite knowing what that something would be. Finding myself a semi-hard plastic cover to a box of marbled paper, I slaughtered it, and was quite certain it would do the trick… until, alas, it too snapped in two, leaving me in a bit of a lurch.

A handmade denim case for reading glasses, embroidered with 'Let go, let come'.

But then I found another type of yoghurt tub, much thinner than the ones I’d prototyped earlier, and thus less likely to snap apart.

Unfortunately, once cut into a flat piece of plastic, a tub of yoghurt is just shy of the length needed for this project. By cutting two pieces, that I stitched together, I overcame that hurdle too, and then assembly of the case could begin. Before I knew it, there I was, with a finished case, that worked like a charm. I was so thrilled with the outcome, I made another case. My guess is, I’ll be making more of these. Will continue to be on the lookout for a better material to use instead of the plastic yoghurt tub. What would you use?