Easy upcycling Project 1: Quilt Cover from Flat sheets

My mum is here for a little over a month to help herd the Little Man and his brand new baby sister. She's also excellent at sewing (even though she refuses to acknowledge that my electric sewing machine is better than her manual pedal machine). As I'm usually quite timid about my sewing skills I take the opportunity of when she's here to supervise to do any sewing projects. Another benefit is that if I mess something up she can fix it :-)

However, even I haven't been able to mess up the sewing projects we've started during her trip. Which involves mainly sewing in straight lines.

Project 1: Creating a quilt cover from flat sheets that come in sheet sets

I have no idea why sheet sets these days always come with a fitted sheet, pillow cases... and a flat sheet! I mean who uses flat sheets anymore? Hubby is a traditionalist and says that flat sheets should be between the body and the quilt cover but how does one manage to keep all the layers lined up. I can't imagine keeping everything sorted in our bed let alone in Little Man's bed. In the morning even his quilt is all rummaged. So flat sheets are definitely out. So what to do with all those flat sheets that come in all these sets.

The good news is that if you buy a sheet sets for a king single bed that you'll have enough material in the flat sheet to make a matching quilt cover for a double bed. The only thing is that you'll need sheets from 2 sets to make it. Just cut them to the size of your quilt (+1.5 inches for the seam.. or thereabouts. I was measuring religiously and mum said "it's such a big piece of material you're not going to see it if you are off by a bit. Just wing it") then sew 3 sides together on the wrong side. Just leave a 3/4 inch gap between the sewn line and the edge.

Then just add buttons on the open edge. We salvaged a couple of buttons from an old jacket that was going to be thrown out.

The result is a "free" quilt cover that already matches your existing pillow cases. This is now our backup cover as we're moving into the nighttime potty training phase of toddlerhood and having spare sheets on hand is always useful.

We even had a little bit of extra material to make a play apron for the little man. 

I'll post about the upcycled apron in Easy upcycling Project 2