Ironing Board

Wow oh wow I can't believe it's been over 2 months since I last posted. What a bad blogger I have become! Nothing is wrong on my end - I'm still here alive and kicking. I just seem to have lost my blogging mojo this year. I decided today to make a goal to blog every day for the rest of the year. I figure if I did it for 365 days last year, I can surely do it for just 2 months, right?! So here we go... I've been wanting a tabletop ironing board for a while now. It's always such a pain to be sewing something, then have to get up and walk across the room to iron. My set-up is such that my regular ironing board won't fit anywhere near my sewing desk, so a smaller tabletop version was in order. (There's a whole big story about me changing to a different space in the house to quilt in but I'll save that for another post!) I was in the Salvation Army a few days ago looking for drawers for my son's new room, when what did I see but the perfect sized ironing board! Sure, it was butt-ugly, but I had a vision for it! Here is the wonderfully ugly ironing board before...

And here it is, all prettied up with a new cover...

It only had one thin layer of batting on it, so I added two more layers...

...repurposed the string it came with, and Bob's yer uncle - a gorgeous and very non-ugly tabletop ironing board! And what did this thing of beauty cost me? The sticker says $2.99, a bargain in itself...

...but it was half price day, so it was $1.50. I used 1/2 yard of designer fabric I bought on clearance for $3/yard, so that's another $1.50. The batting I used was just a scrap leftover from another project, so pretty much free. All up that comes to a whopping $3! Oh how I love being frugal. Old top and new top, side by side...

And here it is in use, ironing a block I'm turning into a candle mat, and some scraps of fabric to be used for applique.

I can't explain how great it is to have an ironing board right next to where you sew. What a time saver! I'm using the above scraps to make an "Applique Today" quilt to use as a new banner. Fun things are in store, so you can now keep checking in for FAR more regular updates! Yes I know I've said that before (as in every post I've done this year) so I have a lot to prove. Thanks for hanging in there folks!