A Fabric Lined Basket

I find myself in a permanent struggle with mess and grot and junk in my house. I am always having a sort out but most of the time it feels like two steps forward and five steps back. You probably know the kind of thing. I deal with the pile of junk in the kitchen counters but another pile of junk starts to grow on the table. I sort out one bedroom only to find that my boys have trashed another bedroom. It is bad. It’s kind of like giant triffids growing and growing, only its not triffids, it’s boy art and man shirts and wires for stuff only nobody knows what and craft gubbins, bits of Lego, old bus tickets that are apparently not rubbish. Awful. So I decided a little while ago to properly attack the kitchen. The shoe rack was bothering me most so I started there. It was so covered in coats and bags there was no room for shoes! The clue’ s in the name, people! So I bought some coat racks off Ebay and thus began my war on the kitchen.

Fast forward a few months and the piles of clutter that had colonised the top of the fridge, the piano, the dresser, the counters (and behind them and down the side of them) have been sorted out. I’ve painted the dresser, we have somewhere to hang coats and the kitchen is blue. Mostly.

I’m really happy how the dresser turned out! I don’t have any before photos, but perhaps you can imagine a grotty, old pine dresser, knobs missing, weird stains, piles of post all over it. It was the mankiest thing in the universe. Maybe. So I dealt with the mess, painted it, got some new knobs and it’s like a new dresser!

I had previously tried to address the issue of post being dumped on the dresser and we had been using a old cat food box to put it in before sorting it out but I didn’t want to put a nasty old box on my pretty dresser. Fortunately I had a little basket that was just post sized! It had a calico lining already but it wasn’t very nice and as I had some Tilda fabric I decided to make a new lining. I used the original lining as a pattern. The basket handles were an issue. On the original lining the bit where the handles were had not been finished properly, so on my new, pretty lining I made binding for those sections and allowed enough so that it could be tied. I’m very happy with my new fabric lined basket!

I now have plans to pretty up a basket for pegs in the same way!