Cute as a Bucket

There was one thing still missing from my beautiful new bathroom.  A storage place.  You see, my roommate has the left side of the sink, but I had already monopolized the drawer on that side.  And things in that drawer, I wanted to keep on that side.  Clearly, I either needed to keep being an unfair vampire, or I needed to create a new solution.

New Solution: bucket!

  Isn’t it cute?  Would you believe that in it’s former life this beautiful bathroom bucket was red, plastic Lego bucket?  You wouldn’t!

I have a number of empty Lego buckets lying around.  They’re perfect for lots of things.  So I thought, ‘why not use a Lego bucket instead?’  However, after all that hard work making my bathroom look superb there was no way I was going to just stick a red, plastic bucket in there.  So, I made a cover for it.

It was a bit more work than I expected.  My original plan was just to wrap a big rectangle around the outside.  Problem: Lego buckets aren’t rectangular; they’re sort of trapezoidal with rounded sides and corners.

So I tried a new prototype with stripes.  The center blue stripes and the brown flowered stripes are all regular rectangles.  But the blue corner pieces, they’re trapezoids. 

When I sewed all the strips together, I had a sort of little skirt.  A little skirt that fit snuggly around the bucket.  Then I cut some slits to go around the handles and added a rounded-corner square to the bottom.  From little skirt, to little bag.

The bucket just nestles right into the little bag, perfect fit.  The top edges fold-over into the bucket and are glued to the insides.  The handle cover is also glued on.

The lid was one of the hardest parts.  You see that blue fabric is actually an old blouse of my mother’s that I really loved.  The blouse had too many stains to be worn as a blouse any longer, so I used it for my bucket cover.  After piecing together what was left of the blouse’s large flat parts (as opposed to collars and sleeves), there wasn’t enough to fully do the lid the way I wanted.  So, I added a 2” band of the brown flowered material all the way around.  Like blanket binding.

The lid is wrapped in the very large square (about 3x the lid’s size) and wrapped with string to create a cute little bow/flower looking thing.  It looks much cuter in real life than that picture.  There’s fiber-fill in it to poof it up a bit, make it look cozy and hide the red color that would otherwise be seen through the blue.  (The bucket cover itself is lined).

I’m really pleased with how the bucket turned out.  It’s a great addition to my new bathroom.  :)