not entirely a sewing project

My friend's daughter is turning 2 this week. My friend, V, has been looking for a play kitchen for this occasion--but not just any play kitchen, an old school wooden one. When you're dealing with a budget, I guess those are not easy to come across. What she found however, were instructions for an IKEA hack to turn a little side table thingy into a sink/stove combo piece.

So we spent Saturday honing our woodworking skills.

Or really, V honed her woodworking skills, while I honed my wood holding skills. I'm afraid of power saws.





So what you see on the left, is the end table, with a hole cut in it for the stainless steel bowl 'sink', fabric circles glued down for the 'burners', cabinet handles for the 'knobs', and some 1/4" plywood for the 'oven' door. The feet are wall/shelf brackets and all that is attached to the thicker plywood backing with a dishdrainer for a shelf.

The 'fridge' is a toy chest that we painted, put some hinges on and put on brackets of its own. There are a couple of shelves inside as well, just more thin plywood on glued on wood cleats.

We decided we were done with woodworking when it got to the decision about making a door for the under-sink cabinet. I offered to whip-up a quick curtain.

(I'll share a photo once it's actually in place.)

I had already decided to make an apron for my individual contribution for the birthday girl. I started that with pieces from a Moda charm pack that I picked up a quilt show a few weeks ago.

I took the charm squares and just cut them on the diagonal and started playing around, arranging them into something pleasing to the eye--my eye anyway. I used some wrapping paper to trace out a pattern for the apron shape and cut two of those out of muslin, making one side shorter than the other. I sewed the charm square patch to the bottom of the short muslin piece, sandwiched the two together, did some basic stitcing-in-the-ditch over the patched part and edged the whole thing with bias tape. I think it's going to fit funny for now, but it will be something that the 2 year old can grow into too.

When it came time to do the curtain, I cut some of the other charm squares in half and patched them together. Some quick seams, some leftover bias tape and that was about a 30 minute project.