felt board curtain

This is crossposted on Philly Makes!, a group blog I joined for artists, crafters, designers, and makers of all sorts who live in Philadelphia. The point is to make and post about one thing a week. I thought it would stretch myself creatively a little.

I haven't posted much in the last couple of weeks, because the main thing I had to make was room on my hard drive for more pics. Now my computer is sufficiently backed up, and I can post again!

I could write about the total failure jacket I made out of old Tshirts. The concept was cool and a little a propos for Earth Day--reduce, reuse, recycle and all that. But the jacket turned out really, really dumb looking. So I'm going to post about a little idea I had for my almost 4yo son's room.

We basically have a one bedroom apartment, since we are caretakers for a historic house. The room off the kitchen (commonly known as the dining room) is my son's room. I've done a lot towards making a kid's paradise in the very limited amount of space I have. The door between the kitchen and the room has windows on it, so we've always thrown a blanket over it to block the light from the kitchen at bedtime. But that's a little unsightly. So I FINALLY made a curtain (I hate making curtains) from some navy blue canvas I had lying around.

We can't waste any space, so I put a couple of large pockets on the bottom for storage. But the major addition was a felt board. I had a pile of acrylic felt (from back before I knew you could get/make wool felt, if you can believe it!) lying around that needed using up. I tried pinning and sewing first, but it was a little unwieldy, so I fused the edges down and then zigzagged the finish.

Ellis immediately loved it. He had me cutting stuff out as fast as I could (hence the stars and houses that are a little unshapely as I freehanded them). There's pockets right underneath the felt for easy storage of the felt pieces. I positioned the felt board just high enough that he really has to stand on a stool right now, but he never has to worry about his one-year-old brother messing it up.