The zippers set the size of the batch. She had about forty in a drawer, so there will be about forty pouches, and every scrap going into them is left over from something already finished.
Paula of Pola Quilting sews these in runs for charity, and the video is the whole run rather than one pouch. She made four prototypes first, changed her mind twice about the tabs, and only then settled on a size. Her panels are 7 1/2 by 10 inches, with linings cut the same from fabrics she would not put in a quilt.
Three different piles become those panels. Leftover muslin foundations from a dress, with strings laid over them from a batch of Nigerian clothes she had cut up. Offcuts of ready made blocks from a course of hers, joined with a half inch seam and topstitched flat because the block is thick. And blankets given to her for batting, too thick for the project she meant them for, strung over the way you would work quilt as you go and trimmed to 10 by 6.
The problem she solves out loud is that last one. A zipper does not want to be sewn to a padded panel with a seam running through the edge. So she trims the top of the blanket panels and adds a 2 1/2 inch strip of linen, which gives the zipper a thin flat edge to sit against. It works on any pouch made from quilted leftovers.
The zipper tabs are her own method. She cuts pieces the width of the zipper, sandwiches the end so the metal teeth stick out past the fabric, sews a quarter inch, opens it out, topstitches half an inch clear of the metal and trims what is left. Nothing metal shows when the pouch is open.
It went up in September 2026 and is worth the thirty seven minutes for the batching alone. She bastes each panel to the zipper with a long stitch first so the real seam only ever has two layers under the needle, topstitches the front panel and not the lining, and does every pouch to the same stage before changing thread, needle or foot.
If the scraps are the reason you clicked, we wrote up how to sort a scrap pile and turn it into quilts here: scrap quilt patterns.
Her channel is Pola Quilting, where the numbered quilting projects series lives.
