In the Sewing Room

When I sew, I hear voices in my head.

There are two of them. One is super strict – “Slow down and cut carefully.” “Make all the markings, even those little weird triangle ones that you don’t know what they are for.” “Pin Everything.” “Press all the seams before sewing”.

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The other is super lazy. “Go faster, I’m hungry.” “Who needs to iron, it’s going to get wrinkled anyway.” “Top-stitching takes too long and who is going to notice it anyway.”

I often let the lazy voice win. And way too often, I end up frustrated with a wonky fitted garment or something that took a long time but ends up looking homemade.

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Last summer while cleaning up a flooded basement after a super heavy rainfall, I found a small plastic bin with long lost craft supplies. Most everything was past it’s prime – lots of no longer sticky stickers, crumpled and faded paper and dried out paint.

But one survivor was a cute little counted cross stitch kit.

It was a great distraction from the scheduled project of mopping and bleaching the basement floors.

After I finished up the little card, I looked for more cross stitch love, and was rewarded with a lot of cool work being done on a much larger scale – pegboards!  

While they looked amazing, that scope of project is a little large, literally. It would be hard to get something that big home without help from Mr. SuzerSpace, and I’m not sure he’d be onboard with such a project. He’d probably point out that it would be difficult to hang in the end as well, and he would be right.

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Mr. SuzerSpace and I recently upgraded our cell phones.

Previously, I was using the box the old phone came it as my super fancy 🙂 phone holder for my nightstand. The box the new phone came in isn’t made the same way, so it didn’t work as well. So I decided to craft up two custom trays.

I used a 9 x 12 sheet of felt from the craft store. I didn’t buy the super thin and flimsy felt, but I also didn’t buy the super stiff and expensive version either. Like a crafty Goldilocks, I chose the sheet in the middle that was just right.

I placed the phone on the felt sheet and then tested some folding and pinching to see what measurements I needed. It won’t be a phone holder if it doesn’t actually hold the phone. Turns out I could use a half-sheet to make each tray, so I cut one into two 9 x 6 sheets.

Using a piece of junk mail as my template, I drew 1″ square lines directly on each corner on my felt with a Sharpie. Normal people would use a fabric marker that would disappear, but my fabric markers seem to dry out exactly at the moment I need them. Since the felt was dark colored, I figured I could get away with this technique.

To begin shaping my tray, I folded the corners and made sure the lines aligned. I wanted the corners to stick out, not be boxed in, so I did this wrong sides together.

The black Sharpie line I drew for alignment and sewing is hard to see, so in this photo I’ve added a red circle to highlight where it is.

I then sewed straight down the sharpie lines, being sure to backstitch at the beginning and end. I used a sewing machine, but if you were patient, this could be done by hand as well.

Once those were done, I had a bowl with pointy corners, which would have worked, but it isn’t what I imagined, so kept going.

I folded down the sides, and pinned them so they wouldn’t slip away.

And then using a zipper presser foot on my sewing machine, and my needle as far to the right as possible, I stitched a line very, very, very close to the folded edge. I didn’t try to sew all around (the corner thicknesses would have been tricky) – I stopped and backstitched at each corner and then moved the needle to the next edge and started again.

This created a neat little stitched seam all around that added structure to my tray.

Mr. SuzerSpace requested a small cutout at one end to thread his charging cord through, which I did with an X-acto knife.