I’ve been seeing a lot of quilts getting finished during the quarantine. There seems to be a bunch of people out there on their 3rd or 4th quilt and I’m sitting here having finished nothing more than a couple of crib sheets. It can be a little discouraging seeing people being really productive when you feel like the days are passing by so fast and nothing is getting done.
Those are the days I have to remind myself that we’re in a really unique period of time and whatever we’re getting done is okay! All these new changes and uncertainties are bringing about new challenges and it’s all right if you have days where you’re just too overwhelmed to get much done.
It’s been a little hard for me to put my sewing and dyeing on the backburner as I have to shift over to suddenly homeschooling but sometimes I just have to remind myself that my kids are my priority right now and that my projects will still be there whenever things get a little less crazy. On top of everything else that’s going on I have the added bonus of being one of those people that pregnancy doesn’t sit well with, so there are some days I literally am not capable of doing much more than being a lump on the couch or curled up in bed. I just have to accept that it will take me longer than I hoped to get all my projects done.
We’ll all get through this one day at a time by doing what we can and trying to not stress about the things outside of our control. (I know, much easier said than done.)
So I present to you, two crib sheets – the only sewing I’ve managed to get done in the last several weeks.
Review of Simplicity 8939 Fitted Crib Sheet
We’re going for a camping/outdoorsy theme for the nursery and I hadn’t found anything in the local stores that I really liked, so I figured I should just find some cute fabric and make my own instead! I dragged my husband into JoAnn and made him help me pick out some fabric for the sheets.
The only time I pick up patterns is when JoAnn Fabrics is having their pattern sale and I can pick them up for cheap. I’ve been having major baby brain lately and though I probably could have figured out how to make a crib sheet all on my own I thought it would be nice to not have to think about something and just follow the directions.
Since I had only just enough fabric to do this once I wanted to make sure that the pattern would work for my standard sized crib mattress. Annoyingly, this pattern does not include the finished dimensions of the fitted sheet so I had to calculate the measurements from the template. By my measurements, these sheets would have ended up 3″ too short!
So strike one, I already had to do more thinking than I wanted. Strike two, it didn’t seem that it would even fit when I was done, wasting a bunch of really cute fabric!
I ended up having to look at online tutorials for the sheets anyway because I thought maybe I was wrong about the measurements, but yup, every tutorial I could find had the same measurements I thought I’d need to make the sheets – exactly 3″ longer than the pattern template called for.
There was extra confusion when the online tutorials were calling for much longer pieces of elastic than the pattern. I realized then the pattern only had the elastic along the short edges of the sheet instead of all the way around, and that made for strike three for me! I really don’t like sheets that only have elastic on the short sides. I’ve had a few in the past and they always seem to stop fitting the mattress well after a short while. Fortunately I had bought enough extra elastic to make it go all the way around on mine.
I basically ended up following an online tutorial for the whole thing anyway plus I had to modify my measurements because the fabric I bought was narrower than recommended. (Ugh, so much extra thinking!) I really don’t know why JoAnn doesn’t label fabric width on the bolts. I don’t normally buy a lot of fabric there, so I guess lesson learned! Next time I need to bring my measuring tape so I can check out the width.
Overall, I felt that even at the discounted price of about $2 it ended up being a waste of money. I only wanted it for the crib sheets – none of the other pieces included in the pattern appeal to me. I don’t know, since I didn’t actually end up making the sheets maybe they would have somehow magically worked out and fit, but I didn’t want to risk it when the math wasn’t making sense.
In Summary:
Instead of buying a pattern for a crib sheet I recommend finding a good tutorial since it’s such a simple piece to make. Here’s the tutorial I ended up following from See Kate Sew.
