Occupying my Sewing Room This Week

So this week is the great event "Occupy Your Sewing Room."  See the top of my sidebar for the link to the main post.  My sewing room happens to be in my dining room at the moment.   The real one is in my garage, but as I mentioned in my last post, we've been well below zero lately, and the garage has no heat.  So yeah.  Not gonna be occupying that sewing room this week.  And since I run a home daycare, it's not like I can just lock myself in a sewing room for a week (or even a day) anyway.  But that doesn't mean I can't participate in the spirit of the event! 

 I actually accomplished a whole lot more than I expected to today. For instance, the wreath above.  That was a project I found on Pinterest - covering a wreath with different sized white pom poms and some glitzy ones here and there. Fun and easy. The hardest part was finding bags of only white pom poms. The only place I found them was at Michaels - which is a three hour drive for me, and no, that was not the purpose of making that drive ;)  One downside I hadn't thought of was that my door and my walls are white.  So I'm not quite sure where to put it so it will show up well.

 Then there was this trivet, which amounted to a bag of dollar store glass beads hot glued to a circle of felt.  I'm planning on gluing a piece of cardboard under it for stability, but see above for the note on the subzero temperatures in our garage...


Okay, then there's this little masterpiece, which is the only one of today's projects requiring any actual sewing... and that was just for the center seam.  This is a cover for our toy sorter.

 
Here's the sorter without the cover.  Dad and I built this back in 2005.  It's great for organizing toys, but the daycare kids (and my own, ahem) think it's great fun to get six boxes out at once and dump them on my floor.  Ugh.  So I dreamed up a solution.


I covered a piece of plywood with felt.  My husband thought up the idea of attaching springs to the back of the board to hold it safely on the organizer.

 The springs reach out like so...

 And attach to screws on the inside frame of the cabinet.  In hindsight, it would have been better the other way around. And we may still change it, because it is challenging to reach the screws to hook the springs on.

 Either way, when it's hooked on, it fits snugly in place, assuring no little people will get squished by a falling board.  If you pull the cover out, it looks like this picture.  To unhook it, you just pull it out and reach in to unhook the springs.

So there you have it.  No, this wasn't so much sewing, but I couldn't do much of that today. I had three new daycare kids start today, and that required all of my attention, and then some.  If it weren't for nap time I wouldn't get anything done.  This cover will save my sanity. Within the first five minutes of their arrival, the two year old had managed to pull out and dump six boxes of sorted toys ... which then needed to be resorted lol.  It was  kind of a long day.

My sweet husband was such a great help. He even worked on fixing (again) the $30 futon I dragged home this summer from a yard sale.

  

 But I'm sure it was a cinch since he had help... er... maybe not ;)  This one of mine is every bit as helpful as the daycare kid I mentioned above, and just as busy.  Birds of a feather.  Gotta love 'em!