At Little Creek Maple Farm, we are all about making things that we can use around our suburban farm that make our lives easier. My bottle wraps are useful and fashionable. They fold flat for storage and you can attach them to a cooler handle when they are not in use.
First let me say that I love the concept of quilting, but I don’t like to make huge quilts that take a long time to complete. I am always looking for smaller quilting projects. I enjoy working with multiple fabrics and prints to make a more interesting final product. Maybe it is my interior design background that makes me enjoy making color combinations ‘pop’!
It started as an idea last Father’s Day when I was trying to come up with something I could make for my dad, and my husband. Both of them seem to have it all, so coming up with gifts is difficult. I knew they would both appreciate having something that I made for them, and I wanted it to be personalized.
Here are the problems I was trying to solve:
- How can I help keep my dads water bottle cooler longer in the cup holder of his golf cart in the hot Florida sun.
- How can I keep my husbands drink from sweating all over his woodworking shop.
- Make it easy to store unlike those foam coozies, which we have tons of but can never find.
- We need to eliminate huge puddles of water under a water bottle that has been sitting on an end table in the living room.
- The drip that inevitable drips on your shirt when you take a sip of a cold water on a hot day.
- One coozie that fits several different kids of water bottles, beer bottles etc. Have you ever tried to squeeze a Dasani water into a can coozie?
- A coozie that is not tippy. It is easy to knock over on of those squishy can coozies because the bottom is squishy.
- I don’t want to get a wet hand when I take a sip of my water
- Secretly, I think Bill was looking for a way to identify his water because I am a drink abandoner. I open a water, take a sip and then put it down, and then I cannot figure out if it is mine.
I decided to make two prototypes. One for a water bottle for my dad and one for a can for my husband.
The first one was for my dad since it needed to be done in time to be shipped to Florida for Father’s Day. It was a little taller for a water bottle. I used Insulbrite thermal batting between two layers of cotton. I quilted it with my signature wavy freeform lines. I cut it down to size, bound the edges and zig-zagged the Velcro. Viola, a custom drink wrap!
My dad said it was effective at keeping his drink cooler with out the drippy bottle. His one comment was that the Velcro was not wide enough to allow it to fit other sized bottles. I have redesigned and resized this original wrap to accommodate wider Velcro for different size bottles.
The second one was much shorter for a can size. It still fits on a water bottle, but it only covers about half the height, basically where your hand goes. I was looking for a coozie that was short enough that you did not have to put your lips on it to take a sip. My boys helped me choose the fabric for my husbands’ wrap since it was for Father’s Day. Bill’s comment was that it needed to be taller since he uses it on water bottles.
We discovered that this shorter design fits well on a kids size water bottle. This is now the size of the kids water bottle coozie. My kids always have a water bottle that they take to school. This wrap serves as a bit of protection as well as personal touch so they can always find their water bottle.
I am looking for a fellow sewist with a blog who would like to exchange products and reviews. Please email me if you are interested wendy@littlecreekmaplefarm.com
Wen,
