Thrifty covered rocking stool

The theme for the first week of Crafting with the Stars was Dollar Store/Thrifted items. Pretty wide open. The contestants came up with some pretty cool projects. Go to Sew Dang Cute to check ‘em out – but after you’re done here!

Since I’m playing along at home and not competing against anyone, I didn’t want to buy anything extra. Luckily, I do have some thrifted items around cluttering up our house waiting for an upgrade.

Enter the grimy rocker foot stool. Do you love the dust and mysterious white spots? Sadly, those have mostly appeared SINCE the stool came into our house.

I love a good rocking chair. And if I can put up my feet and have them rocking, too? Pretty sweet. But the potential for foot swaying bliss is about the only redeeming feature of this stool. It’s not the prettiest thing for sure. And my kids love sticking their fingers into the rocking parts at the bottom –pinches waiting to happen.

The solution? A cover, of course.

This cover was made from another thrifted item – not sure exactly what it was before, but I’m guessing curtains? Or maybe a table cloth? Anyway, I had enough of it to cover the top and sides of the stool.

If you can see past the bad case of flash-itis showing in my photos, you can see that this is a fairly low-effort project. I basically just hemmed the edges and tacked the corners together with some zig-zag stitches (feed dogs down) to create a box shape. I folded the excess corner fabric to the side and cut off the additional bulk. Done. Oh, not quite. There was a small strip of fabric leftover, so I serged the edges to make a matching embellishment for the chair cushion. The whole lot needs a good pressing – will save that for morning.

So far, week one of playing along with CWTS has accomplished what I hoped it would do: get me out of a rut and back to crafting, even on a limited scale. I'm really looking forward to the challenge for week 2!

PS…watch out for my very first GIVEAWAY tomorrow! YAY!