Easy Wonder Clip Bowls

I've been working on some more little sewing projects. Little things are so fun because they go together fast, and suddenly you have a completion! Yay!

So here we have three little... pea pods???

Below is the first one I made, to match my Honeycomb Basket and Pixie Basket. It's an Easy Wonder Clip Bowl, from the pattern by Birdcage and Thread which can be found here. I love it, as it's very handy to use. It's low profile so doesn't get in your way, yet it holds over 50 Wonder Clips easily, and it opens wide, due to the zipper and the round bottom.

They're easy to make, so I decided to make a couple more. I wanted one of them for the larger size Wonder Clips, big enough to hold at least a package of 24, which is what I have. I had to figure out how much to enlarge the pattern. I only had one #3 zipper long enough (20") to do the job, so I calculated how much I could enlarge the pattern and still fit the zipper. I came up with 20%. I printed the pattern but was not sure it was going to be big enough, so I decided to split the side piece down the center, adding ½ inch. I needed to keep the top and bottom curves the same, but since that didn't leave me with a straight edge on the side opposite the folded edge, I drew a line to connect the two corners, giving me a new seam line.

Hopefully you can see and understand what I meant. Below is the finished pattern piece.

Here's the comparison of sizes of the bowls flattened, before finishing.

Sewing the round bottoms was a bit fiddly, but very doable.

And voilà! ...the two finished Easy Wonder Clip Bowls!

The larger one easily holds the 24 clips with room to spare.

When you purchase the pattern, you also get access to a video tutorial. It's nicely done and has some helpful tips, including how to put zipper pulls on.

Back to the zipper part, I used the same single zipper to make both of those bowls. You only use one side of it per bowl. Of course it requires an additional zipper pull, but I had a package of various colors on hand. However, I learned that not all pulls are created equal! My zipper was a Talon one, and my pulls were YKK. The pulls would NOT close the zipper, no matter how many times I successfully got it put on. I finally had to go dig up another Talon zipper and cut the pull off that. Talon zips aren't the quality of YKK ones... they just don't slide as nicely. I'd gotten mine when we still had a local store that sold zippers, and that was the only kind they had. Now 99% of my zipper supply are YKK, most of which I've gotten from ZipIt, which I cannot recommend highly enough - great prices, great service, fast shipping!