Mother’s Day: Coffee Cup Sleeve

It’s hard to find gift ideas for my mom sometimes.  Well, that’s not entirely true.  My mom has a lot of interests and really it could be very easy to find something for her.  The problem is that she is 78 years old and lives with my sister.  So, really, she already has everything she needs and much of what she wants too.  And, space is limited.  I don’t want to give her something that will just create more clutter and I don’t want to give her something that’s yet another piece of an already large collection and will get lost among the others.  I want something special or useful.

Mom just loves her morning coffee.  She’s very particular about what coffee she drinks, just how it’s fixed, and even what kind of cup she drinks from.  She’s also still a very busy woman with a part-time job and lots of volunteer work and activities with friends.  So I decided that for one of her Mother’s Day gifts I would make her a coffee cup sleeve to use when she’s stopping past Starbucks on her way to one of the many events on her calendar.

I found some remnants at the fabric store – you don’t need much fabric for these! I used a paper coffee sleeve from one of the coffee shops around here as my template – cut it down one edge to open it up.  I traced around the template onto the fabric leaving about a half inch all the way around as a seam allowance.  I cut two pieces of the pretty fabric for each sleeve – I just used the same fabric for the inner and outer parts of the sleeve but you can certainly use coordinating fabric instead.  I also cut a third piece of just some scrap fabric to make this a bit thicker – you could also use some fusible web here or a really thin layer of quilt batting or something.  I stacked the three pieces together with the right sides of the pretty fabric showing and inserted a piece of elastic cord (as the loop to go around the button and hold it closed), folded in a loop into one end.  I tucked in the edges of the fabric all around, making little cuts to allow some ease around the curves, and top stitched all the way around.  My final step was sewing on a button on the edge opposite from the elastic loop.

The bonus to these is that you can wear it as a pretty cuff type bracelet as well! The give in the elastic cord makes it adaptable to most wrist sizes.

I didn’t have a chance to photograph all my step by steps to make a full tutorial here so if my instructions aren’t clear enough, here’s a tutorial I found online that sounds very similar.  http://www.craftbits.com/project/take-away-coffee-cup-sleeve