I needed a nice place to store the wool that I’ve been processing lately. I had this crate that I bought from Joann’s a few years back:
It was bought to store our potato harvest at the time, but now it’s been sitting empty. While doing some spring cleaning, I re-discovered it and realized that it could be used for what I needed, but it has open slats that aren’t protective enough for wool storage. What it needed was a liner.
I’ve had this cream and ivory colored damask-ish remnant for years and could never find a use for it. It’s from my Craigslist haul way back when. Turns out that holding on to it wasn’t a mistake. I’ve finally found a place for it. I also pulled a piece of embroidered satin from my stash to line the 4 corners of the crate with:
Design Concept
The crate is unusual in that it has wedges fastened into each of it’s 4 corners. This made me think that I should fashion the liner with 4 inserts to mimic the wedges. That’s where the satin remnant comes in. Using a contrast fabric for the wedges would add visual interest to the liner, as well as help use up more spare fabric that I have.
Execution
I measured the crate and added a 3/8″ (.5 cm) seam allowance for all the pieces. I cut the bottom panel with slanted corners to match the shape of the wedges. I cut 4 vertical column pieces out of the satin for the wedge corners.
I attached the satin columns to the short end damask pieces:
Then I pieced the longer ends with the satin ends to complete the liner walls, and finally, pieced the bottom to that.
This project wasn’t without problems though. Turns out that even with as much seam allowance as I added on all the pieces, it still wasn’t enough. The top of the liner was too small to fold over the top! I was surprised by this! The math of making a crate liner is a bit more complicated than I thought. What I did to remedy the problem (and save my project), was to splice in an extra piece of the damask. Luckily I had a little left. The piece that I needed ended up being an upside down triangle: wider at the top and tapering to narrow at the bottom. That’s the amount of room that was needed to make the liner fold over the top and not pool too much at the bottom. Here’s a pic of the splice:
The splice made the satin wedge move over a bit, but it couldn’t be helped:
I guess that I needed to cut wider wedges all around to have avoided this problem? I don’t know for sure until I try again, but for now I have a working crate liner that serves as a cozy place for my hand processed wool to live:
And after all, that was what I set out to do in the first place.
Take care and ty for reading 🙂
Sewcoordinated 