draft stoppers

my second sewing project is done! we needed three draft stoppers for the crawlspace doors in our bedroom, which also happens to be the attic. very drafty! so i made these.

they were very inexpensive to make: i used an old bedspread i bought at a thrift store for $5 and i bought a big bag of sand for less than $5 at strosnider's hardware store. after i machine-sewed the bedspread into tubes, i filled some empty newspaper bags about halfway full with sand, squeezed all the air out of the bag and tied it at the top. by doing this, the sand molds nicely to the inside of the sewn tube. i filled each draft stopper with several of these sand bags and used fabric scraps to nicely fill out each end before hand-sewing it shut. one thing i really like about these is that nothing was wasted in making them -- the scraps left over from cutting out the fabric went into filling out the ends of the draft stoppers.

strosnider's was selling pre-made draft stoppers for $13 each and they weren't as good as these -- they were only filled with pillow stuffing. for less than $10 i made three much better ones, and i still have a lot of the blue bedspread left for other projects and sand for our front steps when it gets icy. and they didn't take very long to make, just a couple of hours. yay me!