The last couple days I've become a sneezing snot factory, culminating in fever of 99 degrees last night, which is super-high for me since I'm normally 97.6 degrees.  I say "culminating" as wishful thinking because I don't want to get any sicker ... please.

When I first start getting sick, I usually can't sleep.  Friday night, I tossed and turned for hours.  Around 4:30 AM, I got out of bed and went to the office/craft room.  I'd been vaguely thinking of making a crochet hook holder that I could hang on the wall next to my craft table.

I'd done a quick sketch of a horizontal thing, but for some reason, in my sick-haze, I decided to change the design to a vertical panel with diagonal pockets.  With zero planning, I steam rolled my way through and came up with this.

I'm pretty impressed that I was able to do this without my contacts in and (most likely) with a fever.  It was SO HARD.  It looks like it would be easy, but it was, like I said, SO HARD.

First, I cut all the little pockets, sewed the opening seam, then sewed them in a strip so the top of each one was off from the next by one inch.  That part was cake.  The SO HARD part was getting the 1.5" wide strips sewed to the background so they were 1" wide to make a pouch.

I can't find the right words to explain what I did, but it involved sewing individual pieces of 1" wide stabilizer behind each pocket and then sewing the thing the background in between each pocket.  Seriously, there were hours of trying out ways to get those pockets on there so they were pockets *and* straight.

I used all sorts of gifted and leftover fabric (recognize yours?).  The stitched dashed lines were sewn with floss from my box of floss ends.  The pink bias tape is vintage from my Green Kitchen stash.  I printed out the numbers on paper and sewed the little squares on the background.

There was no way in the world that I was going to embroider the numbers.  For one thing, I would have made a mistake.  For another, I don't actually own all these sizes, so it'll make things easy to change if I find other hooks outside of the 'accepted' size system.

I used the millimeter size to label them.  The whole letter/number thing gets on my nerves *and* it's different from manufacturer to manufacturer ... and sometimes different over the years within a manufacturer's line.

I really love how this came out, even with it's strange mistakes.  I plan on putting little notes in the pockets if I've stashed the hook away in one of my ziploc bag projects under the ironing board, so I know where to find it.  I'm also thinking there needs to be some embroidered title across the top, but that might have to wait until my next fever.