If I Lie Down, Perhaps it Will Pass
I’m finding myself obsessed with the idea of making about 14 zillion (or, alternately a dozen or so), of the little felt cubes I linked to on the last post. The sort of obsessed where I’ve taken measurements of my shelves and sourced materials (fancy pants industrial felt that comes in a whole range of thicknesses, and about 3 awesome shades of gray) and made schematics and otherwise gone a wee tiny bit insane. Can someone out there explain any reason this is a terrible idea? Am I overlooking something obvious? Is there some reason this will end in tears?
Doing it myself will be cheaper, will let me get the precise size I want, and will let me get the color I want (this is only because the color I want is ‘gray’…if I wanted something more colorful I’d be out of luck). It will also mean some sewing, but that’s fine, it’s all straight lines. At least at this stage in the process it is. I don’t doubt I’ll find a way to complicate it up between here and there.
I’m going to sit and think on this over the weekend, but if nobody talks me out of it, I may be ordering a few yards of some seriously sturdy felt come Monday.
Those storage cubes are all over the quilt blogs and have been included in several books on modern quilting, but they make them with cotton quilting fabric. If you used heavy felt, you wouldn’t have to worry about raw edges raveling out, and if the felt was heavy enough, it would stand up on it’s own without any cardboard or interfacing. It would be helpful if you could get a sample of the felt before you plunged in though, so you could see if it will go through your sewing machine, or if you are planning to sew them by hand, how hard it is to get a needle through them. I was looking at “Sunday Morning Quilts” at the bookstore Friday, and it includes instructions for the boxes, and the idea is to make several of them in individual colors, and then store your scraps in the matching box. (You would make a red box and put red scraps in it, for example.) And there were pictures of all the boxes lined up neatly on a set of white shelves. That has been stuck in my brain, except I want to make them for sock yarn.
Well, I’m seriously thinking about ordering a set of the aqua ones from the children’s site you posted last, so if you’ve gone over the edge, you’ve taken at least one more with you!
Those are SO cool, and I hadn’t seen them before. It sounds like a fun project to make them just the size you want. Why not, really?
Okay…I had the same idea but I was thinking about making them with removable lids and out of severly felted old wool sweaters from the Goodwill. Make a pattern first out of newspaper and you’re set. This is not insane at all. It’s fabulous! 😉
You should only make them if you’ll be sending them out to all your regular testers, 😉