Carolyn Pearce Home Sweet Home workbox 45: making the inner tray and attaching the roof

I’m on the home run now – completing the inner tray of the Home Sweet Home workbox from Carolyn Pearce’s book.

This is the inner tray, just after I’ve Ladder stitched the base of the outer layer in place. The panels were made in the same way as the lining of the box itself – fabric laced over mount board, and then Ladder stitched together.

This shows the inner tray the right way up.

I then measured the lengths I needed to cut for the lining of the inner tray (Carolyn gives exact measurements in her book, but makes it very clear that you need to measure YOUR box for exact sizes. My box seems to be almost an eighth of an inch smaller all round than hers, so every panel needs to be cut a bit smaller). This is before I Ladder stitched the inner box to the outer one – but first I needed to insert the dividers:

The dividers are quite a fiddly bit to do. For the first (smallest) divider, the lining fabric needs to have a piece of iron-on interlining attached to one half, with the seam allowances pressed down to make creases along the straight sides, and also at 45 degree angles across the corners.

Then the fabric is laced across the half where the mount board goes (same size piece of board as the interfacing), and the two corners mitred and stitched down.

Then, with the seam allowances turned in, the top half is folded over the bottom half, and the rectangle is Ladder stitched all the way round.

Then, quilting thread is put through the divider in three places with a long needle, with the lengths left about a foot long at each side, for tying off later.

The second divider is made in the same way (but without stitching the two halves into one just yet). Three holes are made in the mount board – I used a hat pin.

Then, three of the quilting thread ties from the smallest divider are threaded through the three holes on the second divider. I put the leftover quilting threads in a ‘thread stopper’ used for beading, to prevent the divider from just sliding off the threads!

This is what it looks like from the other side, at this point.

The third divider is made and attached in the same way, then the dividers, as one piece now, are inserted in the inner tray shape, and the remaining quilting threads are put through holes made in the inner tray lining walls. You need to be an octopus at this point to keep it all under control – even with my husband helping me to hold it all together we got in a muddle!

But once all the threads are tied off tightly, it looks like this – nice and sturdy.

But the inner tray still needs a base – and it isn’t just one base piece. The instructions call for four different pieces of base, padded and made up separately, so that each compartment has a snugly fitting base piece.

The stripes have to match up across the whole base, which was tricky to do, but finally each piece was Ladder stitched in place.

The roof lining pieces first had the remaining ends of the cord ties attached to them midway along each of the short sides.

It wasn’t in the instructions, but at this point I decided to glue the knots of the cords to the seam allowances of the roof linings, to be on the safe side. I used GS Hypo Fabric Cement, which is a really strong fabric glue. You can get multi-purpose glue in a red tube from the same company, but the purple one is best for fabrics. I bought mine from Ebay.

The roof linings were then each Ladder stitched to the respective roof pieces (making sure that the slightly smaller back roof piece went at the back!) all the way round, with Ladder stitch.

Finally, the lower edge of each roof piece was Ladder stitched to the top of the walls on each long side.

Finished! Final pictures of the finished project next time!

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