Lost Socks?

 

Mr L and I each have separate wash baskets and do our own washing.  Now, one of Mr L’s special skills is losing his socks in the wash.  He always has a selection of odd socks lying on top of his sock drawer so I thought I’d make him this lost sock organiser for a fun birthday present.   Now, as I had left it until the last minute to decide to make this, I couldn’t paint a piece of wood as there wasn’t time for the coats of paint to dry.  So, instead I decided to cover the board with fabric.

First, I cut out my words in heat transfer vinyl.  After a few false starts, namely forgetting to weld the letters so the cursive words came out as a single piece and then forgetting to mirror the cut so the letters would be the correct way round to be stuck on, I finally got the words cut.  I used my cutting mat to align them and ensure they were level before using my Cricut Heat Press to stick them onto the fabric.

The next job was to prepare the board.  I glued two layers of wadding onto the board before gluing my main fabric on top.  Then I tuned the board over, folded in the raw edges and tacked the fabric to the board using my staple gun, pulling the edges taut around the board.

The last job was to mark the locations for the pegs.  I used a heat erasable pen and my T-square ruler for this before attaching the pegs with my hot glue gun.   The advantage of the heat erasable pen is that when my lines turned out to be longer than my pegs, I could easily remove the marks by lightly rubbing the (clean!) hot nozzle of my hot glue gun over the fabric.  I could have used a hot iron too.

Here’s the finished article.  Mr L loves it!  It made him laugh when he opened it, he’s just concerned that it doesn’t have enough pegs!!