Last night, I was able to get some sewing done while baby napped. The other day, I had started a fabric bucket that I had found in a sewing pattern book I had gotten from the library. I decided to finish this. Because it uses upholstery fabric, I needed to use my heavy duty sewing machine that I got at Goodwill (my first sewing machine). After breaking a couple needles, I realized I was using light weight instead of heavy weight needles so I sent David out to buy me more. I also discovered the easiest way to thread the machine for this project was to have upholstery thread for the upper needle and regular thread for the bobbin. I only have one spool of upholstery thread that I had bought for the pouf so it's brown and didn't really look good on my dark blue fabric but that's okay. This bucket is for personal use anyway.
Boy oh boy was this project a pain! I thought it would be easy and it sort of was (after figuring out the broken needle problem) but sewing circles onto rectangles (the bottom of the bucket is a circle, to attach it, you sew it onto a rectangle) is not all that easy. Plus, the instructions were not very clear. I'm not very happy with the end result and it's smaller than I first thought it would be (as you may be able to tell from the picture, it's shorter than an iron). I would make a lot of changes if I were to make it again.
The other project I worked on last night only took 20 minutes, and most of that was spent tracing and cutting out the pieces. Our diaper bag came with a portable diaper changing mat. We have a changing table in the nursery (upstairs) but sometimes you want to change the baby downstairs. We had been using the mat from the bag but it's been a bit of a struggle to remember to put it back in the diaper bag every time. I decided to make my own.
I had some vinyl-y type fabric I had bought with no project in mind (it was really cheap and I liked the look of it---that's how I get most of my fabric). I decided to use this for both sides (top and bottom). Then I cut up an old blanket (the same one I used for my tree skirt) for the padding in the middle. I sewed it with the same idea as my burp cloths. Vinyl facing up, vinyl facing down, blanket on top. Leave a gap to turn. (I will note that because of the vinyl I used my heavy duty machine with the upholstery thread again). Then I top stitched it. I should've hand sewed the gap closed like I normally do but I decided the top stitching would be enough. Well, that ended up kind of messy to get all the ends tucked in and secure. It's okay though since again, it's just for personal use.
After I sewed it, I realized I should've sewed in ribbon to close it since it's really easy to roll up but there's not really a reason we would take this one on the go instead of the other one.
The lines you see going horizontal are just creases in the fabric. I wasn't sure how to iron vinyl without melting it. I also decided against putting a pocket on the bottom since I'll probably still be using this when baby gets bigger and I wanted there to be enough space on the mat and thought the pocket would take up too much space. Plus, we just keep the diapers and wipes on the end table right next to the mat anyway so I'm not worried about it.
To size the mat, I based it off of the one we already have but for those of you interested in making it without one to go off of, this mat is 12 inches wide by 24 inches long.
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