It's Not A Macaron Or A Macaroon

Yesterday I was browsing through Pinterest, as I am known to do, when I stumbled upon this:












Adorable, right? It is a macaron coin purse designed to look like the oh-so-popular-right-now macaron cookies which look like this:

Not to be confused with a macaroon which looks like this:



and is usually made with coconut.

Are we clear?




I went to the website with the macaron coin purse instructions and confirmed that it is indeed adorable. It is also tiny which makes it virtually useless. I'm not sure you could stack 2 quarters in that sucker.

The instructions were very clear with lots of pictures but I could tell that trying to hand sew on something that small would put me back in wrist braces.

It still looked a little bit useless to me and I just couldn't justify spending that much time on something that would serve no purpose. I often spend a great deal of time on things that others might see as serving no purpose, but even if an item is decorative and just sits on my shelf looking pretty, that's its purpose. I couldn't see how a tiny coin purse would fit with my home decor and it certainly wouldn't fit all the loose change I need to carry around so I decided I didn't need a macaron coin purse.

But it sure is cute. I love how round and puffy it is which made me think it might make a good pincushion. I have pincushions on the brain lately because my sister makes them out of vintage porcelain pieces and sells them at antique stores and online.

The only problem was that I couldn't figure out what to do with the zippered part, which is the best part about it. Then I thought if it was a little bigger it could be used to hold needles. Yeah. Pins on the outside and needles on the inside. And wouldn't it be great if somehow the inside was magnetic so that the needles wouldn't roll around in there and would be easier to pick up? Yeah, I thought it would be great too so I went about trying to figure out how to make that happen.

Altoid tin pincushion/needle holder.

24 hours later here is what I ended up with:

It's cute, it's functional and even though it's definitely not the same as the macaron coin purse it was inspired by it.

I've decided to sell it at cost which would be $479.00. That's just labor and materials: $0 for materials and $479.00 for labor.

Needle compartment.

Hidden magnets hold the needles.

Cute as it is I won't be making another one like it until I can figure out an easier way to do it. That shouldn't be a problem since I now have a long list of what not to do.

There was both sewing and gluing involved but I ended up sewing what I should have glued and gluing what I should have sewed. That was made even harder by the fact that I didn't have the proper glue on hand and I couldn't just drop everything to go buy some. That's like asking a shark to go take out the trash during a feeding frenzy. You're wasting your breath cuz he's just not going to do it.

If you would like to make a similar pincushion/needle holder, start with an Altoid tin shaped like this:

Then cover it with fabric, put some magnets in the bottom, a puff on top, a zipper in the middle and you're done.

And for Pete's sake, put a piece of fabric on the inside to act as a hinge and to cover the ugliness of the zipper. I can't believe I forgot to do that. What a rookie mistake.