Saving The Sheets

I am a tight-wad.

Not frugal.

Tight.  

People who know me well know this.  It might even be that people that don't know me well know this too.  

I also have a thing about throwing stuff away that still has life in it.  

A real problem.  

I am getting better, though.  

That being said, I also have a hard time getting rid of things that are old but are better quality than I can buy today. 

 For example, I like nice sheets.  I like sheets that are smooth and stay that way.  

(I also like flannel sheets that are not smooth, but that's different.)

Sheets with higher thread counts are the good ones, and are very expensive.  I bought a pretty high count sheet set on sale for my daughter and while they don't pill, you can see through them.  

I have a lovely sheet set that I picked up at a garage sale.  

They are very nice but I think they were discarded in the conspiracy that exists in the mattress market today.  

Mattresses are thicker, therefore all the sheets you ever had before don't fit them, thus you need to buy more sheets.  At the time I still owned a thinner mattress and the sheets, and with the elastic refreshed on the fitted sheet, they worked very well.

Fast forward a few years...

To celebrate the end of cancer treatments we bought a new mattress.  I didn't want to, of course, but ours was getting to be one those that has fallen in the middle and hilly around the edges.  As much as my husband and I love each other, spending every night in the valley just doesn't work very well.  

So, we bought a new mattress.  It was thick, the flannel sheets fit (having been purchased this century), the old ones didn't.

We struggled with the old ones, they didn't work.

We tried sheet straps, they worked half the time.  

I looked at sheet sets.

I was confused with the choices and annoyed with the prices.  

We used the flannel sheets as long as possible. Until the first of June, this cold spring.

Finally, after a few days of over 80 temperatures. we had to give in.

So, I was looking for other options.  I found a website with a tutorial on how to make fitted sheets, so how much harder should it be to add on to these sheets to make them deeper so they will stay on the thicker mattress?  

Actually, not hard at all if you know how to sew.  

This is what I did.

2 yards of 100% cotton, not quite white.

I drew and cut 8" strips to have plenty of room for hems and tucking under, 

I was going to rip out the elastic casings, but the elastic has melted completely away in most of the casings into gluey spots. Other spots had a few pieces of weird elastic so I had to cut away the casings.

I ripped out the corners so I had a big rectangle with the corners cut out.  Next, I pinned the strips to the edges of the sheets and serged them along the long edges to make a bigger rectangle.

I sewed the corners (the edges of the cut out square) with the sewing machine first, then after trying it on the bed to assure it fit, I serged the edges.

Then, I pressed up a hem/casing and sewed the ends of the elastic into the hem before the final sewing.  

After hemming, I put it on the bed.  With the edges all tucked in there is barely an inch of the new fabric showing. 

I made my elastic too long so I had to rip a bit of the casing to tighten it up after I was finished.  

I'm very pleased and I can use my sheets now until they wear out.  

I won this round.