Ironing Board Cover

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Ironing board covers can help protect your ironing board from constant exposure to heat as well as provide a smoother ironed finish.

Total Project Time: 45 minutes – 1 hour

I will admit, I have been in a sewing mood lately. There are so many fun projects to explore and discover and I wanted to dive deeper into that world. But I noticed something interesting happening to some of the fabrics when ironed. I would see the pattern of the iron grate getting imprinted onto the fabric. After doing a little research, I decided that a cover for the ironing board would help with this problem. One of the great things about this project is the large surface are which is great if you have a design you want to display.

Check out the Craft section of MCG for more fun patterns in forever fabrics or more unlimited ideas.

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Supplies

There aren’t many supplies needed for this project. I would suggest have the ironing board you plan to cover on hand. What you’ll need for this project is:

• Fabric
• Elastic
• Safety Pin

Process

Having the ironing board on hand can help get the exact fabric pattern. The fabric should be cut to have approximately 3 inches of fabric around the outlines of the ironing board. This doesn’t have to be exact, but you’ll want some fabric to wrap around the sides and pull together at the bottom.

Most of this project is spent pinning the fabric. To get a clean edge, you’ll want to curl the fabric under itself to hide the raw edge. The edge should then be pinned about half an inch in from the outer edge of the fabric. I used half and inch (ish, I was not very precise on this project) because that’s was just over the width of the elastic that I had. This step is creating a pocket around the outside of the fabric to pull the elastic through.

And now, we sew! The curves of the ironing board are the only really “tricky” part of this pattern. But since everything should be pinned in place before starting, you just need to follow the pin line. Leave a small, half inch gap or opening somewhere along the project because otherwise you’ll have no way to get your elastic inside! 

Pulling the elastic through proved particularly challenging for me as I first tried this process without a safety pin. Threading a plastic needle and pulling worked well for about 1/3^rd of the process but because it wasn’t fastened to the needle, it slipped off. I tried this method way too many times before switching to a safety pin. And then I learned you can’t have the safety pin too close to the end of the elastic or it could potentially put through the elastic and rip off.

Eventually, I finished pulling the elastic through. Now I didn’t want to put too much elastic into the piece because I wanted the cover to fit tightly over the board. So what I did was placed it over the board and pulled the elastic tight – mimicking the results that I wanted. This gave me a good idea of how much elastic I was supposed to use.  Then all that’s left is to fasten the elastic to itself and close the gap that we left open to thread the elastic. All in all, it’s a pretty simple project with gorgeous results!

Lessons

Pinning Perpendicular

Using pins for sewing can prove to be a little challenging, especially with a sewing machine. The pin heads can get stuck in the machine if you fail to move them out of the way. Or, the worst-case scenario, the needle on the machine could break due to the impact with metal. It wasn’t meant to handle that. This hasn’t happened to me recently. Nope. Definitely not. Anyway, there are two ways to pin fabric while sewing. One is to pin the fabric in the same direction that you plan to sew. This will, generally, mean you must take out the pins as you sew to avoid an accident. The second method is to place the pins perpendicular to your desired sewing line. This method gives the sewing needle minimal contact with the pins which results in you not having to remove them while you sew. I will be looking more into these methods to find more comparisons in future projects for sure! I am lazy so I always want to streamline everything I do.   

Quick Recipe