Techno travel roll

Hello all! I am still so excited and happy about the Give-Away Day! I haven't won anything yet, but even if I don't, I found a number of cool new-to-me blogs, and I hope some of you who visited on Wednesday will keep coming back! 

Here is a Christmas gift reveal. It's the "techno travel roll" from Stitch magazine (get it! now!) and it's for my brother. Like many crafters, I have a hard time deciding what to make for dudes and tend to end up buying something instead. When I saw this project in the magazine, I thought it would be perfect for my younger brother. He graduated from college a year ago and is working his first "real" job right now, but it's far from home and his college friends, so he has already made a number of short flights back to visit them (he has yet to come East to visit me, though!) He also has lots of gadgets, so this seemed perfect. 

I stuck my cell and new iPod nano and cord in the roll for modeling effect. The instructions for this were very straightforward and simple, and I like that the finished project is useful and clean-looking (design-wise). I hope my brother actually uses it! For construction I used a quilting-weight cotton and a little heavier weight cotton canvas--it's sort of upholstery fabric, but not quite that heavy. I wanted to make the roll really structured, so I ironed some medium-weight interfacing onto both fabrics. That was probably a mistake, as I ran into quite a bit of trouble with the side seams (as mentioned in this post). But I think my machine and I have made up, so it's all good. 

Anyone else have ideas for good and useful crafts for men?