My oldest daughter is away at college and it’s her birthday this week so I wanted to send her something special for the occasion (and something easy to ship too!)  She mentioned she didn’t have any decent makeup brushes so I made a trip to Sephora to splurge on a new set for her.  While I was there I thought about something to hold them all and wanted to give her a little handmade gift to go with the new brushes.  I thought a cute fabric pouch would be perfect so I stitched up a makeup brush holder with some leftover fabric remnants from my stash.

This was one of those projects that I made up as I went along but I tell you this, if you can sew a straight line, you can make your own too!  Here’s how I made this fabric makeup brush holder for my college girl in about an hour.

First grab yourself some fabric, for this I used two remnants, one a blue medallion cotton fabric, the other a cotton duck lining.

Here are the measurements of fabric used:

First start by sewing your inside pouch.  Take your first piece of liner fabric (see diagram above) and fold it in half.  Lay it on top of the second piece of liner fabric and roughly map out the location of your brushes.  They really only need to be spaced about 1inch apart, mine are 1 ½ inches in the picture below which ended up being too much but I added extra pouches in the end so it all worked out.  Pin your folded over piece of fabric to your liner piece and stitch together where pinned.

Next stitch the individual brush pouches one by one and varying by size.  Use your brushes as your guide if necessary.

To tie it up at the end, you’ll need some straps, so make some with two strips of fabric.  To get them right side out, weave a safety pin attached to one edge through the strap to reveal the outside of the fabric.  It helps to press the straps flat with an iron before sewing them to the brush holder.

Once your individual brush pouches and straps are sewn, flip the liner + pouch inside out and layer it on top of the exterior fabric.  Make sure that exterior fabric is also turned inside out so that the front of the pouch and front of the exterior fabric are facing each other.  Pin and sew together, making sure the straps are sewed inside the holder, and allowing 3 to 4 inches of an opening in one corner.

Flip your fabrics right side out to reveal your makeup brush holder, you’re almost done! Now it’s time to seal up your opening.

You can use a simple stitch on top of course (like I did with these placemats) or you can do a decorative edge.  Ever since I got this new sewing machine I’ve been dying to try out the fancy stitches so I went for it.  Number 50 it is!

OK, how cool is this?  I pressed the button and along the seam was an instant decorative edge, uh-may-zing!  I used it to seal the opening shut and give the makeup brush holder a little bit of somethin’ extra.

You can fold up the makeup brush kit in a roll and tie it closed with the straps for travel, how fantastic is that?

So that’s my step by step to making a simple fabric makeup brush holder.  You can use the same technique to create a holder for artist’s brushes or pens and pencils too.

And now that I look at it, it’s just so darn cute I’m thinking I’ll definitely have to make one for me too!

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Tags: DIY, makeup brush holder, simple sew

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