The Tuffet by Myra Mitchell

There is a particular holiday coming in three weeks, and I decided to make a present for my hubby dearest. A year ago in the summer when we were in North Carolina to visit his folks, we stopped at a nice little shop called Thimble Pleasures in Chapel Hill. I had heard about the shop on Annie Smith's podcast. This is a very nice shop, and it's well worth the visit. While there, I looked for a footstool pattern that Annie had mentioned. When I showed it to Hubby, he said that it would be a very nice addition to our home. "The Tuffet" pattern has been hanging over my sewing table ever since, with occasional questions from Hubby about when we would get a new footstool. This past summer, when we were in the Upper Peninsula, he found some nice flannels that he really liked.

This weekend, Hubby was at a church thing all day Saturday, so I took advantage of the time. Now, he is a large man, so I went in a different direction than the directions indicate. I bought a foot stool at Pier One and a piece of round wood at a home improvement store. Look at the nice fit:

Here's a close-up of the stool:

At work on Friday, I had consulted with the building manager and one of her staff members about how to attach the board and the stool. The three of us talked things over and came up with this idea:

I am married to a computer guy, so I knew we had these in the house. I secured the board and the stool to each other, marked the board, and drilled some holes:

Here are two views of the board, newly stained and with the zip ties in.

Then, using a bread knife, I cut the foam, using a circle template. From this point forward, I pretty much stuck with the instructions in the pattern (which you could get from Thimble Pleasures and probably at your local quilt shop as well).

I traced out the foundation pattern on to eight pieces of muslin. You could use up to 64 pieces of fabric in the tuffet, but I had three fabrics. I went for a walk and mulled over how to approach the problem. I realized that I could make my pieces different sizes. I decided that each foundation would have a single-sized piece of light fabric, a double-sized piece of dark fabric, a single-sized piece of light, and a quadruple-sized piece of the bright fabric. 1+2+1+4=8 Here is one of the marked foundation pieces:

Here are the fabrics in the correct proportions:

I did the piecing onto the foundations:

Here is the button for the top of the tuffet. It's from a coconut shell, and I lucked into it at my local big-box fabric store.

I forgot to take pictures of the stuffing and stapling processes. Here is what the end result looks like:










Here is the final product:

I really liked working with this pattern. It is well written and easy to understand. You will want to read the instructions carefully before purchasing your supplies and definitely before beginning the task. I like the finished project, and I hope Hubby Dearest likes it, too.

Finally, because no post on this blog would be complete without a cat picture, here is the Brat Cat scarfing down the remains of the peanut butter granola on which I snacked during the sewing time - because if it's available, it's hers.