I am pleased to announce that I have published a new pattern.  I designed this one to hold all those cables, memory cards, batteries, etc.  that are so necessary when you are travelling — or for that matter, when you are using your laptop, tablet, or smartphone at home.

Last year when we drove to Alaska I misplaced one of my cables somewhere in the car.  So we had to search all over in Canada to find a similar cable that would do the job.  Of course, when we got home and I unpacked, there was the original cable!

So this year I vowed to avoid that problem by making myself a special bag to hold everything I needed travelling in Europe with my digital camera and tablet.  By the time I gathered everything in one spot and started designing my “gadget roll”, I was amazed at how much stuff there was. Of course I went overboard by having duplicates and backups for most everything!

Now I use this gadget roll all the time at home, and I am going to design more of them for use for other applications.  Here are a couple of photos of the open and closed roll:

Open, loaded with all my gear:

And rolled up and tied for easy packing and storage:

Now I just have to make a bunch of these for Christmas gifts this year — as soon as I find some “guy” fabric — and I won’t have to do any other shopping at all!

Pattern is available on Patternspot.com — see my pattern page for the link to my Patternspot “store”.  There isn’t a specific description and photo of this pattern on my pattern page yet — a few technical difficulties are stopping me- but the pattern is at my Patternspot store.

Here is the gadget roll in red.

 

 

And while I was working on these I learned that Velcro has made a change to their product.  I don’t know how new this is, but it was new to me so  I am going to pass it on.  At my local store (JoAnn’s}  Velcro™ is sold both by the yard and in a package.  On the roll, it is the traditional product — one side of “hook” tape and one side of “loop” tape.  So when you buy a yard, you get a yard worth of fastening length.

Alongside the traditional product were pre-packaged products that look like this: 

It says on the package that it is one yard of product.  And it is, but they have  redesigned the product so that it is both hook and loop together.  So one yard of product now only gives you 1/2 yard of actual fastening, because you use the same product for both sides.  The package says this in the fine print on the back — if you take the time to read it before you buy.  I don’t think the fastening is quite as good as it used to be, either.  It feels a lot easier to pull the two sides apart on the new product.