What to sew to organize your home?
Good resolutions aren’t limited to January 1st! Back-to-school is also a great time for the whole family to tidy up the children’s bedrooms, the office, the kitchen… And put in place solutions to keep everything tidy.
We’ve got a few sewing projects for you to start the school year off on the right foot!
Organize your belongings in storage pockets
If you’re tired of seeing things lying around in the kitchen, in the kids’ bedroom, on the living room table… Why not sew some pockets to hold all those things you don’t know where to put away?
You can choose a cotton (with the addition of iron-on to make it more rigid), suede or upholstery fabric to match the furniture, upholstery or paintwork of the room in which the pockets will be placed. Or imagine a color code to identify contents at a glance.
The Miss Cactus pattern offers the possibility of sewing four different sizes of storage units.
So you can store them in every room of your house or apartment, from paperwork and make-up to kitchenutensils… depending on your needs!
Baskets for everywhere
In the same way, pretty cotton baskets (which can also be reinforced with fusible webbing) are a good way of providing storage space for keys, small change, etc. You can also place them on the children’s desks for pens, small notebooks, etc., and in the bathroom for jewelry, hair clips and scrunchies.
Baskets are also a great project to start sewing, since their shapes are fairly simple and don’t present any particular difficulties. You can personalize them easily, for example by stem-stitching the name of the room for which the storage unit has been sewn.
Tidy up your clothes
If you’d like to keep your clothes or the kids’ in your dresser drawers more organized, you can also sew a clothes organizer yourself by following our free tutorial. It allows you to separate a drawer or closet into several spaces and keep your underwear or T-shirts neatly organized.
But you can also use it in other rooms, such as the kitchen, by replacing cotton with coated cotton or oilcloth, making it easier to clean.
For this project, you’ll need cardboard rectangles to create rigid walls.
Wall-mounted storage that’s easy to adapt
We’re all familiar with the perforated panel sold in furniture stores, which can be used to hang all sorts of small accessories: hooks, baskets, clips, etc. You can also sew yourself a similar storage space using scraps of fabric and a piece of felt to stiffen the panel in contact with the wall.
Buttinette offers a free tutorial for getting started on this project, as does Sew Can She. The idea is to customize the storage units to your needs and sew the fabric rectangles and squares to the desired size.
If you’re making this panel for a child’s bedroom, you can customize it with fabrics they like and ask them what they’d store inside, so you can sew the various little pockets to match. Wall-mounted storage can be adapted for use in the kitchen, in an office, in your sewing corner, in the adults’ bedroom…
Storage for the sofa
We tend to leave all sorts of small objects lying around on the coffee table: glasses, book, remote control, chocolate bar… To remedy this, we can simply sew a storage unit to slide over the side of the sofa, following Aurore’s sewing tutorial, for example.
Here again, this project is easily customized by adapting the color to match that of the sofa or living room, but also by modifying the various compartments to accommodate your specific needs. It’s all up to you!
Do you have any ideas for sewing projects to improve your storage space? Are you planning a major back-to-school clean-up?
