Kidlet: Wall Pocket - Tidy Tote

When I found that awesome kiddie art organizer - the Crayon Wallet pattern (read my Crayon Wallet post here), I came across Jennifer's Kidlet PDF pattern on her blog. It's an ingenious and artistic solution to store my DD's toys that I'm constantly finding abandoned all over the house!

Here's the story behind the Kidlet:

"While out for a walk with my little ones one day, I was thinking about ways to creatively encourage them to pick up after themselves. I wanted something large enough to hold a bunch of books or softies, but small enough to use unobtrusively throughout our home. Kidlet has a deep gusset to accommodate lots and lots of the "stuff" that's always lying around and has a handy strap to fit over a doorknob. It's plenty sturdy for wee ones to carry their precious goodies themselves and you needn't worry about them fiddling with a long strap. Put up a few fun hooks for a row of Kidlets in the playroom, or strategically hang them over doorknobs throughout the house." - Jennifer Casa

Jennifer used to sell the Kidlet pattern in her Ebay store, JCasa, but now she offers the PDF file as a free download on her blog! Nice!

This weekend I finally got around to sewing three of them for Serenity's room. It took very little fabric; I used small pieces of scrap material from other projects, and left-over canvas fabric Wal-Mart had marked down that I found months ago. I decided to put them on Serenity's "bookcase tower" of her castle bed, and I used inexpensive, plain white hooks to hang them up.

As soon as I finished, Serenity started singing the Barney "Clean Up" song, and then put her toys in the Kidlets! Smart baby girl! The cleaning might not last, and I'm pretty sure it's only because the totes are a kind of a fun novelty thing right now, and the compulsion to clean up will, more than likely, wear off quick. {sigh}

But she does like the totes, and I think that's because of the kid-friendly material I used. The Kidlet is a smart and creative organizer and I plan to make a few more to hang up all around Serenity's room. If there is even the slightest chance it'll entice her to keep her room clean, then I'm all for it!!

I probably need to add a few Kidlets on the top of her castle bed. It's where her bed and "lounging area" is at - she's always dragging a ton of toys up there. That part of her castle stays messier than the floor!

BTW, Serenity's castle bed was a joint effort of my family coming together (with no or very little woodworking skills) for a week, and building this HUGE Castle Loft Bed, using only pictures I found on Picasa of a Castle Bed built by DaveMC for his little girls. Click on the links so you can go see the pictures of us building Serenity's bed, and get a bit of an idea of how we did it. You can see how DaveMC built his little girl's bed too. Somehow (I told you we didn't really know what we were doing), we miscalculated on the width of the bedroom and almost didn't have enough room for it to fit! Serenity LOVES her bed, actually every kid from 2 to 22 loves her bed! My sister is 22 and said she wished she had a bed like that growing up! Well, tell you the truth - so do I!!

POST-IT NOTE: I think Kidlets would make cute birthday party gift bags for the guests to take home!

The pattern is easy to follow and it's very simple to alter it to fit your needs. I made my Kidlets a tad smaller than the one in the instructions, and I used canvas for my handles instead of cotton webbing. On two of the totes, I used heavy fusible interfacing and the result was a much stiffer tote, but since I was using a canvas fabric it got kinda hard to sew in a few places. I probably won't use any interfacing on my next canvas totes, but it's a good idea to use it when you're working with regular cotton fabric.

Head on over to Jennifer's blog to get your free Kidlet pattern download. It'll only take about an hour or so to sew each tote. Jennifer offers a quite few other awesome PDF patterns and tutorials that are available to download for free too. Go have a look-see at her blog today!

Have fun!