Toddler Step Stool

My niece's birthday is quickly approaching, she is going to be 3. When I spoke with my brother to see what she would like he suggested that I make her a step stool for the kitchen so she can reach the counter and help cook.

The step stool is going to be painted so I'm not planning on being to picky about the wood. I wanted something about 12 inches wide to cut the sides of the stool out of. When shopping at Menards they had a board that was 1x12 inches at 4 feet long for $17. It seemed a bit expensive considering they sell 1x6 at 4 feet long for $3. Since I have a planer and need some practice I just picked up a few of the 6 inch boards and glued 2 of them together.

Here you can see the (almost) 12 inch board after being glued up and planed down, there's also a picture of our shop helper Chewie.

I cut all of the pieces out of the 1x12 @ 4ft board and 2 1x6 @ 4ft boards.  Two of the smaller boards are for the steps and the other two are for kick plates to make sure my niece doesn't lose her footing. 

The kick plates were ripped down a bit and the excess pieces are going to be used to keep the stool sturdy in the back. You will understand a bit better as we go along if you can't visualize it yet.

To make sure the left and right side were the same size, I used double sided sticky tape and put them together. Then I took them to my spindle sander (drill press attachment) and sanded them down to the same size. They were already pretty close but after cutting them out on my band saw they were just a little bit off in some places.

Before assembly I rounded over the front and back edges of the top step and the front of the bottom step as well as both sides of the handles. I countersunk all of the screw heads far enough to plug with a dowel and predrilled all of the holes to make sure there was no cracking when tightening up the screws. You can see here on the top step that there is a lip on both sides, this is to again make sure that my niece doesn't lose her footing and have a spill.

Here I have plugged all of the holes with a dowel, I cut the dowel pieces down to a manageable size with my band saw. It took some elbow grease and a rubber mallet to tap in the dowels with a bit of glue.

I used my random orbit sander with 80 grit paper to grind down the dowels. After that I switched up to 120 grit. At this point we are ready for paint.

I used a green paint that matches my brothers kitchen cabinets and a pink paint that he had lying around. They go together better than I thought they were going to. 

And here is the final product. I used a stencil for the flower and printed one for her name. 

University of Michigan Themed Heat Therapy Rice Bags

There's been a fair bit of crafting going on in the house the past few weeks, but most projects are still works in progress that should be done in the next two weeks.  The one completed project so far is a set of rice bags I made by request from one of my coworkers.  His three year old dog has a recent leg injury and needs to have heat and cold applied each day after his walk.  My coworker had a similar bag filled with beans, but it quickly became a destroyed cat toy and a replacement was needed.  He selected a University of Michigan print and provided 10 pounds of rice.  10 pounds!  I gave one of the 5 pound bags back.

In order to make it easier to switch from hot to cold, I made three bags.  One can be kept in the freezer when not in use, the other can be warmed in the microwave.  The third is a backup in case one of the first two somehow become a cat toy.

The finished bags are 6"x6" squares.  There is about two cups of dried rice in each bag.  I trued up the fabric, and while the fabric was folded into four layers I cut the fabric 6.5" from the squared edge.  I opened the cut fabric by one fold, so there were just two layers.  From this, I cut off the selvage edge and cut three 6.5" sections.  I used the top and bottom layers of each cut for the same bag, so the size and shape would match up perfectly.

I pinned the corners of the two pieces for each bag together, right sides together.  Then I began sewing from the middle of one side all the way around with a 1/4" seam allowance, leaving about 1" of space to flip the bag inside out and fill with rice.  I attempted to clip the edges with some cheap pinking shears from a beginners sewing kit I purchased a few years back, but gave up and pulled out my Fiskars shears.  Good cutting tools are worth every penny.   Once the edges were trimmed, I pressed the seams to set them and to make it a bit easier to turn the bag and get the corners to pull out properly.  The 1" opening was a bit tight to flip the bag right side out, but it was doable and minimized the amount of whip stitching I had to do to close the bag.  I used a handy paper plate that has been rolled and taped into a cone shape by Lee to fill the bag with rice.  Once filled, I whip stitched the gap closed.  I strongly recommend listening to "Whip It" by Devo whenever whip stitching is required.  It makes the experience so much more entertaining.

The bags were completed pretty quickly as I made about a dozen hand sized bags to keep all of my Uncles hands warm last winter.  My cutting, sewing, hand-sewing skills, and sewing machine have all improved since then, which I would guess helped this project go as smoothly as it did.  I sure hope the recipients recovery goes just as smoothly.