Reupholstering an ottoman
My sister recently came to my house for a sewing date. The plan was for me to teach her how to sew a simple stretchy long-sleeved shirt, since she’d wanted to learn to sew clothes, like I do.
She showed up, however, with a different project in mind. She thought we could also recover the ottoman from her living room, which she was in the process of redecorating — swapping the old blue and tan palette for a new colour scheme of charcoal grey and mustard yellow.
She didn’t bring the ottoman, though. She just brought the thick fabric she’d removed from it — after yanking out the upholstery tacks that had once held it in place.
Could we work with that? Of course we could!
Continue reading in my weekly DIY column, My Handmade Home …
… or pin this post and come back to it later!
Kids Ergo — the end to fidgeting at the table?!
*** The great folks at ErgoErgo offered me two KidsErgo seats for our son and daughter to test out. All opinions and wild-eyed kids are my own. ***
It was supper table anarchy.
Our nine-year-old son was partial to crouching on his chair like he was squatting around a campfire cooking something he’d caught with his bare hands, instead of eating a perfectly normal meal with his family at the table.
Then he’d shake things up by tipping his chair back from the table so it was balancing on its two back legs, tilting his head closer and closer to the hardwood floor. That one really irritated my husband, who’d put on a particularly gruff “Dad voice” and bark that the chair had four legs for a reason.
Across the table, meanwhile, our seven-year-old daughter preferred to kneel on her chair. She’d hunch forward so far over the table that her long curls were constantly getting dragged through pools of noodles and getting dunked into her glass of milk.
Read MoreDIY weighted blanket quilt
Let me start by saying that this isn’t a tutorial on how to make your own weighted blanket, and there’s a good reason for that.
Weighted blankets require poly pellets to give them their heaviness, and buying those pellets alone can be just as expensive as buying a ready-made weighted blanket.
While I love to DIY as much as I can, I draw the line at spending more money on something that likely will be a nightmare to create — and maybe not even turn out that well.
Anyway, while I loved my weighted blanket from Amazon, I hated the itchy faux velvet cover that came with it. I would have been happy to use it without a cover, but I would have been in trouble when it got dirty.
You can’t exactly throw a 25 lb. blanket full of plastic pellets into your washing machine … at least, not if you want to still own a working washing machine.
Since I love to quilt and our house is full of my handmade quilts, it made sense to make a quilt that could fit over my weighted blanket.
Luckily, I already had a quilt that was 90 per cent finished and almost exactly the right size. It would just be a matter of turning this quilt into a “duvet cover” to hold my very heavy weighted blanket.
Let’s back up for a minute, though, because I want to share how I made the quilt itself.
Normally I just do standard patchwork quilts (all squares) or maybe large half-square triangles (two huge triangles that form a new, larger square). But I wanted to challenge myself to do a really intricate quilt block with lots of tiny pieces coming together to form a cool pattern.
I’d scrolled through Pinterest until I found a block I loved (the Sisters and Quilters’ blog’s Blueberry Pie quilt block) and forced myself to do something that doesn’t come easily to me: math.
Hey! I’m Heather.
@HFXHeather on Instagram
My Top Posts
PREGNANCY blog posts
