Tuesday, January 19, 2010

2010: The Year of Finishing Begins

Double Draft Stopper

Here it is over halfway through the first month of the year and I'm just getting around to sharing a project I finished on January 1st or 2nd! Yikes. Maybe 2011 should be the year of timeliness.

So I ended 2009 by whipping up a draft stopper for our front door using the leftover fabric from Braydon's stuffed animal carrier and well, there was plenty more fabric and corn cob (even after my first ill-attempt which resulted in a tube so small it got stuck under our basement door and Mike couldn't get in the house).

I did what any good crafter would do, and I started the new year off by making a more complex version of the first. This time the door in question was our basement door in our kitchen which leads to the side entrance which we use almost exclusively. We live in an older house that has had some upgrades to it, so the small, old door has a bit of a gap at the bottom which surely lets more cold air into the main house than we'd like to think.

So learning from my first ill-attempt (see parentheses above), I decided that the only way a draft stopper would work on such a heavily used door was: #1 if the tube was significantly larger than the uneven gap, and #2 had tubes on both sides of the door that were in some way connected.

Mike didn't see how I was going to accomplish this, but I had a plan. Being a frequent craft/home blog reader for several years now, I knew I had seen someone tackle this same problem before (not martha, it turns out). So I sent my mind to work and devised my own way to use what we had on hand, took a few measurements and was off to the sewing room.

Lined again with the hideous brown & pink flower fabric I somehow ended up with several yards of, I made an approximately 8 inches wide by 2 feet long sock. I marked the center and measured out the width of my door from there. Then I sewed the sock into thirds (the long way) and filled my outer two thirds with corn cob and then sewed the open end closed across all 3 thirds.

Wah Lah! I had a draft stopper that easily slip under the gap of the door and covers it on both sides. The door can easily be opened and closed from both sides without losing the functionality of the draft stopper - which is perfect for the main door of the house, it is used all day, instead of only when we're home. And surprisingly Nibbler doesn't find it tempting, despite loving popcorn and gobbling up all the corn cob I spilled with trying to fill this thing alone. Hopefully one day she doesn't get bored enough to tear into it just for the fun of it.

I still have enough fabric and corn cob for at least another stopper, so perhaps I'll make one and put it on etsy or something, that way I can truly "finish it up" because the only other thing I can think of to use the corn cob is tas "brown" matter in my compost bin.

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