Book sling for da boys

The craft bug has bitten again and here's the rundown on what I made. And maybe it wasn't so much as the craft bug bit as I had a buzzing in my ear due to some fortunate circumstances. See last week I received a yard of fabric in the mail that was destined to be a part of some art work that I was putting together for Conner and Nolan' fabulousity room. Only when the fabric arrived there was a dark spot on the fabric. So I immediately contacted the business which I bought the fabric from and informed them of the blemish. The company was awesome and without question sent me another yard of fabric. Well, while waiting on my new yard of fabric I decided to see if I could just work around the dark spot on the fabric to get my art project done, because I'm way too impatient to sit around and wait for the new fabric. And yep, I finished the art project with the blemished fabric (no worries, I'll share this project in the final reveal of Conner and Nolan's room) so when the new fabric arrived I had one yard of fabric and nothing to do. I know, the problems I face are really so tragic.

I have been seeing these fabric book slings popping up in nurseries everywhere and one thing missing in Conner and Nolan's room was any sort of book receptacle. So I found this tutorial for a fabric book sling and as luck would have it, one of these slings only requires 1 yard of fabric. But it did requiring a sewing machine, which I don't have. *sidenote- I would love a sewing machine. And since I know that Santa reads this blog, here's the link to the sewing machine I'm going to be putting on my Christmas list.* But then I looked at the directions and thought that I could probably pull off one of these slings using the heat and bond no-sew hems. I started in using the no-sew hem tape stuff and things were bonding well, and seemed to be holding together. I started to feel a little like Charlie Sheen, because it seemed as though I was winning in the craft world. That is it all went really well until the part where I was trying to fold the fabric over the dowel rod to create a pocket for the rods. It was here that the no-sew tape had met its match as I was trying to bond together about 4 layers of fabric and the tape just couldn't handle it. There might have been some stronger tape at the craft store but again impatience kicked in and I was determined to finish this project before nap time was done. And that's when the super glue was brought out. One tube of super glue later, I had a finished sling. All that was left was to install the brackets on the wall and voila, a fabric book sling to hold all of Conner and Nolan's favorite books!

Cost:
Fabric: free thanks to super awesome fabric company!
Hem tape: I think this is about $3
Dowels: maybe $5 for both
Brackets: $4 a piece, 2 needed for project
Total: $17
Total time: 3 hours, only because ironing on the no-sew hem tape takes way longer than sewing.

And one thing I've been meaning to share is a list of some of our favorite books that we have for the kids. We've been really blessed to have people find super cool books for the kids and many of them go under the radar of well-known kid's books. So I'm going to put the list together and hope that some kids out there are going to enjoy these books as much as my kids have.