Sewing for Tween Girls

Girls seem so easy to sew for…until they become tweens.
My step daughter was invited to a birthday party. My husband requested that I make the birthday girl one of these hats. Great idea…for a winter birthday, not quite fitting for an April celebration.
However his mention of a hat did get my creative juices flowing…
Using fabric and notions from my stash I made a hat. Then I sewed a bag. After that I stitched up a notebook cover. And finally, about five minutes before the party, I whipped up a rolled flower hair clip.

I searched and searched for the perfect hat to sew. I found a few tutorials, but in the end decided to just dive in.

After three failed attempts I smartened up, and followed this tutorial. This tutorial was one of the first I had found, and her hat was super cute. But I didn’t feel like doing the math.
Learn from my first three mistakes- and do the math!
The hair clip is just a basic rolled flower. The material is the same as the hat and purse linings.
When I asked my step daughter and the neighbor girls about popular purse styles, I was told (direct quotes from a group of eleven year old girls):

• They go across your body.
• They have a flap.
• The flap has to close, so their stuff doesn’t flop out when they are running. *I decided I did not want to know why they might be running so fast that their stuff might fall out…
• A pocket is necessary for little stuff like lip gloss.

This bag came together very quickly. (I was successful at ‘winging’ this project.)

The magnetic closure was salvaged from a purse in the refashion tote.
*Not pictured are two inside pockets.

Lastly I had decided to cover a notebook.
Again, I just did my own thing. In my opinion it looked like crap, but the girls loved it.
I was told, “eleven year olds do not even know what seams are, so we also don’t know if they look bad!”
Eleven year old logic won.
Do you have any tween girl gift ideas? Sewing for this age group is so different from sewing for the little guys.

Partying here: