Making the Bed... And Keeping it Made?

A while back I saw an ad for something called Stay-Made bedding. It was this magical set of blankets that were all sewn together in order to help our bed stay made.  It was a really cool idea! Unfortunately it was also a very expensive idea. But it got me thinking, What could I do that would help my beds stay made in a similar way? I decided the first place to start would be to sew my top sheet to the fitted sheet.  So I did.

Here are my boys' bunk beds without sheets (sort of a "before" picture if you will).

I took one fitted sheet and folded it in half, right-side-out to find the center.

Then I took the matching top sheet and folded it in half to find the center (Right-side-out if you put your top sheet on upside down, in-side-out if you put your top sheet on right-side-up. Did that make sense?)

Now line up the centers and put a pin in it.

Unfold both sheets, keeping them pinned together. Place the sheets on your sewing machine starting with the very center (the place where you pinned) under the needle, and make a few stitches back and forth to hold it.

Now stitch from the center out to one edge, pulling the elastic as you go in order to stretch the fitted sheet to a similar width as the top sheet. (Compare this pic to the one above it, and you'll see that the elastic in the fitted sheet is being stretched).

Once you've stitched from the center out to one edge, turn your sheet around and stitch from the center out to the other edge. When you are done, the top and bottom sheet should be connected together all the way across the bottom, and should look bunchy like this.

Now put the sheet on the bed! So this is the point at which I realized I had somehow accidentally sewn the bottom of the top sheet to the side of the fitted sheet. I'm a genius.

After picking out all the previous stitches, I started over and sewed both bottoms of both sheets together the correct way.

Voila!

So, I know what you're thinking. Does it work? Does the bed stay made longer? Is it any easier? The answer is sorta maybe.  The bed isn't staying made (I think sewing it together on one side would do that, but I am too nervous to make that kind of commitment).  But there have been two major improvements. First, we never loose the top sheet. When we go to make the bed every morning (Ha! just kidding. We make our beds like once a month! But anyway....), the top sheet is waiting right there for us (instead of being hidden under the bed, or in the toy box, or in the garage...). The second great improvement is that when the bedding goes through the wash it stays together.  I don't have to worry about finding matching sheets because they are always right there.  Will these sheets change my life?  Probably not.  But the 10 minutes that they took to make (okay, 30 minutes for me because I had to sew them, un-sew them, and re-sew them) will save me a minute or two worth of work every time I make the bed.  And that seems like a fair trade off.


Marcia