It’s A Girl!
We say that because we slapped a skirt on that puppy and called it a day. We’re pretty into just hiding our ugly stuff around here lately. Remember our trash can fencing from this weekend?
Yesterday morning we posted about the disappointment that was our little red table turned little red sink vanity. It was worth a shot right? In the end it was going to be a really time-consuming project (as if a few months of procrastination wasn’t bad enough already) that may or may not look like poo at the end of the day. It was getting to be entirely too piecemeal for our liking.
So, as we’ve also already told you guys, we stared down our leaking pipe and discovered a quicker and easier solution in a rubber washer and some carefully spread plumbers putty.
All that was left to do was cover up the ugliness. And by ugliness we mean some major rust and calcium deposits underneath our 1950′s sink.
We know, it’s a little irresponsible of us to just conceal all of this, but the sink is working perfectly now and is just a little worn underneath. Keeping the vintage charm of the original sink fixtures and not tossing one more clunky item into a landfill is worth the shameful rust-hiding.
When searching the web for sink skirt making inspiration we stumbled on a beautiful example and how-to guide from Miss Mustard Seed’s blog via HGTV. It certainly is perfect, as are all of her projects. But we’ll just be the ones to say it – she is an overachiever. As soon as we saw the words “sewing machine” Chad was laughing and I ran in the other direction to scheme up a cheap knock-off.
We used a method similar to our no-sew curtain making. Here are the details:
Step One: Measure your sink both around and from the sink to the floor. Our skirt was made to attach underneath our sink so we measured as far up under the sink as we could and down to the floor. Use a sewing tape for the most accurate measurement.
Step Two: Choose your fabric. We wanted our skirt to be as gender-neutral as possible, read “no flowers.” It was bad enough I was already putting a skirt on something in our house – the pups were just glad it wasn’t them!
Plus whatever fabric we chose had to easily tie into the color scheme of our adjacent kitchen. No clashing allowed.
So we headed to JoAnne’s Fabrics here in Durham and picked up two yards of burlap, marked at $3.99 per yard. When we got to the cash register we discovered it was 40% off. Score!
We think burlap is a nice complement to our wooden kitchen countertops and sisal rug, while giving some contrast to our start white walls (or at least half of our walls) in the bathroom. It says, “I’m girly enough for a skirt, but rough enough to go camping, or ride a horse, or something.”
The other supplies we purchased, also at 40% off, were a roll of burlap toned natural cotton thread and a package of Velcro made for fabric trimmings.
Step Three: Cut your fabric to size. We added two extra inches to the length in order to allow for a hem, and about 18 extra inches to the width to allow us to make little gathers in our skirt and also hem each side.
Step Four: “Sew” your skirt. We hemmed the right, left and bottom edges of the fabric using this method, same one we used on our bedroom curtains, with iron-on hem tape. We used the straight, factory-cut edge for our top and didn’t need to hem it.
Step Five: Attach your Velcro. The Velcro we purchased was made especially for fabric trimmings. This means that it comes with one glued side to stick to your sink and one rough side to sew directly onto your fabric.
We just stitched the rough strip along the top of our skirt by hand – no robot sewing machines. Make sure you sew the Velcro to the front of your skirt, otherwise you could be like us and have to snip it off and re-sew it. D’oh!
Step Six: Skirt ‘yer sink. Just attach the sticky side of the Velcro to the underside of your sink and press firmly. Go slowly so you don’t have to reposition it. The cleaner and drier your sink the better for sticking.
Ours is pretty rusty as we said, and our Velcro still stuck well. It’s good like that. We just pinched back little gathers in our fabric Velcro at the front of the sink to make the slightly pleated effect.
Now we have the perfect hiding place in our tiny storage-less half bath for extra toilet paper or even worse -golf magazines… boys.
What do you guys think? Too girly? Just right? Still mourning the red table like us? Anyone else with a hubs who insists on having golf magazines in the bathroom?
Thanks for reading! Please feel free to leave a comment with thoughts, tips, ideas or general musings. Triangle Honeymoon is a nice place so all we ask is that you be nice to both us and your fellow readers when commenting. Some comments may be held for moderation but no worries - it will pop up soon. We'll also try to answer any questions posted as soon as possible.
You can also subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader. Thanks again!
