BrittanyMakes

Thank you everyone for all your great comments on the woven bench post! I already have some family members requesting that I make them a bench.  It’s very encouraging, although I just might have to invest in a KregJig.

OH. And about that earthquake!  Is everyone OK?? My grandpa owns a couple stores in Sonoma which got a little rattled, poor guy had to rally up a team of employees at 3:30 am to clean up before they opened.  A friends brother’s garage floor cracked, some keepsakes broke at my Meemaw’s house, and my baby boy slept through the whole darn thing. It definitely woke me up, and motherhood has officially changed my outlook on earthquakes.  I used to think they were no big deal, but this was the first time I really felt panicky that I couldn’t protect my baby from something, and I didn’t like that feeling one bit!  My husband on the other hand, he just fell right back to sleep (ha!), but it seriously got me thinking that we need to fine tune our evacuation plan.

ANYWAY, back to today’s tutorial! You may have noticed a cute little leather handled tray sitting on that woven bench I made…

Maybe you didn’t, that’s OK! See it there now? So cute, right? Well it just happens to be world’s easiest project I made from my stash of leather scraps. If you remember, I made this pinwheel pillow and this camera strap also from leather scraps!  Seriously, don’t toss your leather scraps or fabric remnants, chances are you can easily make something chic and sophisticated with them.  I’ll be here all day encouraging you to do so :P

So anyway, this project started out with a need.  I needed a tray of sorts by my bedside to corral all the random things – glass of water, hair clips, baby monitor, etc, you know, all those random things that make your bedside table look a mess? It was getting out of hand and I didn’t need yet another fancy $50 tray.  Lo and behold I found this $5 fabric covered tray at Target (I can’t find it on the website, sorry!), and athough it was lovely enough in gray linen, I thought it needed a little dressing up.

Naturally the next thing I did was grab my trusty stash of leather scraps.  Then, I measured and cut two 3/4″ x 6″ strips of leather to make two handles.

I cut triangles out of each end so that the handle resembles a little banner.

Using a leather hole punch, I punched one hole on each end of the strap.

I eyeballed where I wanted to place the leather strap on each side of the tray, grabbed my drill and drilled two holes using a bit about the same size diameter of a rivet.

I attached each handle with two rivets, I only had silver rivets on hand but brass rivets would look fantastic here too!

Super cute, right? And so easy? What’s funny is I originally needed this tray at my bedside but now it resides on our coffee table. I’m back at square one with a mess of a bedside table.  Tell me, what do you use to corral your bedside randoms??