We love reaching into a monster’s mouth to get out our moolah—and we’re guessing you will, too! This is a fun, free-form project that lets you design your own pattern. If you don’t want to make a coin pouch, you can skip the zipper and stuff the pouch with polyester filling (or felt scraps) to make a cute-and-scary stuffie!

Monster Coin Pouch

What You Need

• A 4- or 5-inch zipper
• Paper
• Pencil
• Scissors
• Felted wool
• Double-sided tape (optional)
• Straight pins
• Chalk or disappearing-ink fabric marker
• Sharp needle
• Sturdy thread or embroidery floss
• Buttons (or different-colored felt) for eyes

How You Make It

1. Put your zipper on the paper, imagine it’s a mouth, and, with a pencil, draw the shape of your monster face, leaving plenty of room around the zipper for cutting and sewing. Add ears and/or horns as you like. Cut out the pattern.

2. Stick the pattern to your felt with double-sided tape or pin it on with straight pins. Trace the pattern onto the felt with chalk or a fabric marker, then cut the shape out of the felt. Repeat, so that you have a front and a back. (If you’re using thin felt, you can cut both pieces at the same time.)

3. Pin the zipper to one of the cut pieces. With a fabric marker or chalk, mark a straight line along the zipper teeth where you want the mouth to go.

4. Cut a slit along the mouth line. This is easiest to do if you fold the fabric to make the first small cut.

5. Pin the zipper fabric to the underside of the felt so that just the zipper teeth poke through the slit out to the front.

6. Thread your needle and knot the end. Then sew together the top layer of the coin pouch and the fabric part of the zipper, using the backstitch all the way around.nYou might find it hard to push your needle through the zipper fabric, but be patient! When you get back where you started, tie off the thread on the underside of the felt.

7. Sew on the button eyes, if using, or cut circles from felt and sew them on using the whipstitch.

Guess what? A really expert sewer helped us with our green cat and used craft felt (instead of homemade felt) so you could see the process more clearly. That’s why it looks so perfect! Don’t worry—our stitches never look as neat as this. And yours don’t have to, either.

8. Line up the top and bottom pieces and pin them together.

9. Thread your needle with sturdy thread or embroidery floss and knot the end. Sew the two pieces together using either the blanket stitch or the whipstitch. Tie off the floss  and snip the end on the inside of the pouch.

Note: You might be able to find a small zipper at your fabric store, where it will likely be called a “pocket zipper,” but you can also easily order one online. Just type “4-inch zipper” into the search engine (or look on etsy.com). If anyone in your family has ruined a pair of pants recently, you could also try repurposing the zipper from the fly for this project!

Excerpted from Stitch Camp © by Nicole Blum and Catherine Newman, photography © by Margaret Lampert, used with permission from Storey Publishing.