Foldable Mattress

Materials: 3 baby mattresses "Vyssa Slummer" (120x60cm), 1 oversized blanket cover (155x220cm), yarn, sewing machine

Description: First of all my source of inspiration.

My two children love to sleep together on a broad mattress on weekend-nights. We used to have a double-folding-mattress size 180x200cm. It took up a lot of space in the children's room, was slowly ripping apart in the seams, and looked old and shabby. An eye-sore in the children's room.

New foldable mattresses are ugly or expensive or both. Then I saw above-mentioned inspiration but still thought "Well, with pillows inside it won't take long until it will feel like lying on the floor."

And then I was at IKEA. And they had the "Vyssa Slummer" mattresses on sale, only 9 Euro per mattress. I still had a nice blanketcover at home, otherwise I would surely have bought a nice one at IKEA on the same trip.

And here goes:

- I cut open one long side. I used a blanket cover with a zipper, so I cut open the side on the end of the zipper.

- I measured out "height + breadth of the mattress + 1cm" three times and marked it on the blanket cover (long side of the mattress aligned with short side of the cover).

- I measured out the length of the mattress and tucked the surplus of the cover inside (should be understandable with the picture offering a peek inside).

- I sewed along the lines between the three spaces for the mattresses.

- I pushed and shoved in the mattresses and folded the tucked-in surplus over the mattresses.

- I pushed the seams toward the top edge of the first two mattresses and toward the bottom edge of the middle and last mattress. Why? Because that way you can fold them easily.

- As the mattresses are 60cm broad and the cover is 220cm long about 20cm were left after sewing everything. As you can see on the second picture it makes a nice flap giving the folded mattresses kind of a "sofa"-look.

I was surprised about the clean professional look of the whole thing. And my kids loved it and are sleeping on it right this minute.

The whole project took one trip to IKEA, about 30 Minutes of thinking and planning and about 1 hour of marking, stitching and sewing.

And I am a very, VERY inexperienced seamstress. So if you are just a little more into that subject the whole thing won't take you more than half an hour.

~ Anneke, Germany