Sewing foot rest and batting storage
Finished foot rest for non-sewing pedal foot.
It seems like everyone online is having a sewing room clean out. For the past seven weeks I have been cleaning out the house. A major part of this was boxing up my kids’ stuff and shipping it off to them in another state (seriously, a long overdue task). It was a major undertaking, and now that my son has moved, vacated my sewing room and started a new job, it’s the sewing room’s turn to receive a whole lotta love and a birthday. It has been deconstructed, cleaned, dusted and every little thing that needs doing in there is being done from fixing up the ironing board cover to getting my foot rest sorted out for my non-sewing pedal foot.
As my sewing table and cutting table are the same height, I need to raise the foot stool up too. I found an old weathered sleeper off-cut in the yard, sanded and varnished it and put it under the pedal. It was the right height. Then I found an old dense foam off-cut and thought that would make a great non-pedal foot rest. I measured it and got it cut at the local foam store to resemble the shape of my Bernina foot pedal. I forgot to get it squared up but it doesn’t really matter as it’s close enough. It just meant that I couldn’t make a symmetrical cover for it. The inner cover is made from 100% UV curtain block-out and it fully removable.
The roughly cut foam foot rest is ready to be covered.
The inner cover had a flap on the back so it can be removed easily.
This is the back of the foot rest with the cover tucked in.
The outer cover (shown in the main photo) had to be darker as I wear my ugg boots when sewing. It’s the same pattern, just a little larger. They took the best part of two days to make but they are fantastic and now my hips and feet will be on the same angles when sewing. I don’t have to put up with the old makeshift arrangement I had there. Since this photo was taken, I’ve added a sleeve on the underside to wrap around the piece of wood so the footrest doesn’t fall off the wood. This works in conjunction with the non-slip mat between the wood and footrest.
The other thing I’ve done so far is to create a batting storage roll I saw on www.thequiltshow.com. I got an off-cut of top hat metal from our shed and wrapped it in rubber then created a curtain material tube for it and hung it under the trestle table in the sewing room. It’s up out of the way and I have great access to it when I need it. I’m making another for more batting that will be hung underneath it, though I’m using the cardboard tube the batting came on for that one with a couple of hooks I got at the hardware store. That’ll make one less plastic tub to store in my sewing room.
Batting storage under the trestle table.
Side view.
There’s still a lot of work to do cleaning out the shelves, but I’m lucky I keep a tight lid on the amount of stuff I have in the sewing room so not a lot needs to be rearranged or thrown out. I’ve got more covers for pillows, etc. to make but I aim to get everything done before I go back to finishing my current quilt. I’m feeling like this clean (after basically 3.5 years not quilting) is a bit of a love letter to the sewing room and will get me in the right headspace to get back into quilting. I’ll leave you with a photo of a rocking foot stool I made in 2001. It’s perfect under a tall desk and keeps my legs moving a little when I’m sewing all day.
My rocking foot stool.
Happy quilting,
Fiona
Fiona Schiffl 
Leave a Reply