Sewing Project: Saving my Toes (Shallow Thoughts)

Sewing Project: Saving my Toes

I have a platform bed, which means the bottom part is made of wood with drawers in it (I'm not clear why this style is called "platform"). Having the drawer space is handy, but it has one big drawback: it means there's a wood corner right where I'm likely to kick it accidentally in the dark on a nocturnal get-up. I've done this enough times that I'm amazed I haven't broken a toe yet, and I've long been sure it's going to happen some day (especially as I get older and my bones get more brittle).

I've been having a lot of fun at the monthly Sewing Meetup at Los Alamos Makers, and really enjoying it. I've fixed up lots of too-large clothes from thrift shops and tech conferences, and made projects like a purse, padded phone cases, and a a cushion for an aging dining table chair.

So when Jodi, the meetup leader, mentioned that she was bringing a bag of stuffing and wanted to make some sofa pillows, I thought: I don't really need any more sofa pillows ... but I can think of a place where I need some cushions!

Jodi suggested using a thick canvas fabric, for added protection, and the makerspace had some canvas with a terrific pattern that I liked a lot. I sewed up the pillows and added stuffing.

They came out a lot bulkier than I expected. I had envisioned fairly thin cushions, but when I stuffed the first pillow lightly, then took off my shoe and tried kicking a table leg through the pillow, I realized I needed a lot more stuffing if I wanted to protect my toes on those nocturnal jaunts.

Installing them was a little trickier than I expected. I had planned to use small nails or even thumb tacks to attach them to the wood frame. Thumb tacks didn't work at all (they kept bending as I tried to hammer them into place) so I went to the local hardware store to look for some nails, and found out that you can only buy nails in huge boxes. So I got some small brass screws instead, and Dave introduced me to "finishing washers" which also come in brass and look much nicer than regular washers.

The only problem with using screws was needing to make a hole in the cloth for the screw to go through. That turned out to be surprisingly difficult. Using the drill didn't work at all: it just tore up the fabric and clogged up the drill bit with threads that had to be unraveled.

The solution turned out to be the original idea: use nails. But big ones, bigger than the screws. Hammering a big nail through the four corners of the pillow worked fine. The resulting pillows may look bulky, but they don't get in the way much, and it looks like they'll work pretty well for saving me from a middle-of-the-night toe misfortune.