Due to all the snow days, school just ended a week and a half ago. I like to make teacher gifts at the end of the school year. This year, I decided to use a new pattern to make something I hadn’t made before. I picked up the book “Zakka Style” last summer, but hadn’t yet made anything from it.

Zakka Style Book

My oldest son just completed fifth grade and is moving up to middle school next year. As part of the fifth grade celebration, all of the fifth graders and their teachers received water bottles. I decided to make water bottle holders from the book.

Zakka Style Water Bottle Holder

The boys helped me pick out the fabric: natural linen, natural cotton, chili pepper and blue paisley accent cotton.

Fabric Cut and Pressed

Zakka style involves a bit of hand embroidery. I used a running stitch around the body of the holder and around the cotton accent rectangles.

Hand embroidered running stitch

I used a fancy machine stitch to accent the straps in the interest of time. The water bottle holders have two straps: long linen and short cotton accent. The straps can be combined to make one long strap, or just the short strap can be used.

Combined long straps

Short straps

The blue accented holder has nice shell buttons which are used to attach the straps.

Blue accented holder with short strap

Blue accented holder with long strap

For the red chili pepper accented holder, I used a metal button.

Red accented holder with short strap

Red accented holder with long strap

I thought both holders turned out very nice, and more importantly, the teachers loved them!