Summer Project #5: Noah's Car Cosy and Race Track

Where do you put your favourite toy cars when you go out and about?
A plastic bag? Your mum's purse? Your pockets??? well, there is a better place where to put them when you carry them around, where they can be nice and cosy and ready to play whenever you are!

The car cosy is the last of my projects aimed at Little Miss' friends; Noah is a great car (and trains, and buses...) lover, so I thought I could create something for his cars to stay in place and be carried in when he was out with his mum.
The car cosy idea comes from the always wonderful Jill of Homemade by Jill. Her Cozy Car Caddy was the inspiration for mine.
However, I wanted this cosy to be also a race track, so that Noah would use it to play with his cars on it as well as keeping them "cosy"...
So I modified the instructions to make my cosy 1/3 bigger (to allow for the extra roads), and added a few details to make it a little more interesting.
I used the wrong side of a denim quarter for the roads, and green felt for the rest of the landscape. A few scraps of fabric were used to recreate houses, trees and a pond, whilst three bottons worked as traffic light.

Also, I didn't follow the structure of Jill's cosy because I didn't have any decorative pipe, and I thought simply sewing all around the inner and outer panels of the cosy (wright sides facing) and turn the work where the pockets are before sewing them would have been much easier.
My denim and felt roads and landscape panel is shorter than the outer panel of the cosy (as you  can see from the picture below) so that it was easy to turn the work inside out and sew the pockets on top.

 

Before sewing the inside and outside panels, I secured with pins to the inside panel a piece of elastic pipe to allow the cosy to be wrapped and secured with a button (which I sew on the outer panel), and added a decorative applique double decker bus (this is England, after all!) at the centre of the outer panel.

Once inside and outside panels were sewn together, I pinned the stripe of denim, with hem already sewn, that will make the 6 pockets for the cars, to the outer panel as illustrated. 

I then sewed the pockets to the cosy all around, leaving the hemmed part open. Then, I turned it inside out so that now I had a big pocket inside the cosy, which I then divided into six individual pockets.

 
The pockets were made in denim as well, and showing the right side of the fabric to create some chromatic contrast with the roads.

The numbers on the pockets and the road markings were drawn using Tulip Puffy dimensional paint.
A word of caution on this method: I've made some card "masks" (see picture below) to make sure the markings were consistent and homogeneous, however the paint often spread underneath my card mask and made a little mess here and there (to my frustration! I really could scream...); dimensional paint is SO difficult to take off even when it's still wet that really you'd better not make any mistakes!

And this is how you fold the cosy once it's finished: