Cart Cuff - Sewing a Shopping/Grocery/Trolley Cart Handle Covering

hey guys it's Robin are silent crap and welcome to my craft room today I'm gonna show you how to make a cart cuff what's a cart cuff well a cart cuff similar to the cuff that I wear on my wrist is a cover that goes over the handle of a shopping cart so this is a shopping cart handle cover but come on cart cuff sounds cooler it's much easier to say right many of us are now going into phase one during this pandemic and some of us are already going through that phase but there's people that are going out for the very first time to go grocery shopping they have been either having it delivered into the house or someone else has been bringing it for them and it could be a little nerve-wracking after not going shopping for eight to ten weeks and now having to go out into the world you might get a little nervous places like Costco and such are having you wear masks and everything when you go out so you might worry about the safety of the shopping carts now I have been shopping I have needed to go out and do my own shopping since the pandemic started even though I kept it very minimum I still had to go to the store and I noticed that more recently now than in the beginning there are attendants that are outside at the shopping carts and they're going and they're wiping them all down as the carts are coming through and stuff and that's great they're sanitizing you and everything but I still get a little worried are they hitting all the spots I like to sanitize the handles myself I always have even before we had any of these issues cold and flu season gets pretty bad down here in Florida like I'm sure it does everywhere else and I always make sure that I wipe down my cart handles all the time with the little sanitizing wipes they have I also like to wipe down all the edges of my cart now while I'm sure that they're doing a wonderful job wiping down the carts I'd like that extra bit of protection to know that I have protected myself and I've done something to take care of myself so I made this cart cover for the handle of the shopping cart now most shopping carts are about 19 1/2 inches wide now this is going to cover the majority of the handle of the shopping cart this of course it will be shorter this will work for your majority of your Walmart shopping carts for your average size ones now of course if you go to Sam's and Costco's and you get the double wide this won't go from end to end but at the same time you can still just hold it right here in the center you don't have to put your hands on the ends or the bare metal is now even after this pandemic is gone it'll also be good to use these handles to cover the cart like if you got small children out you know they're always putting their hands on it and they're always trying to chew on it for some strange reason so you can still use it then you can use it for your own safety and security even past a pandemic so when the flu season comes around again plus we don't have this problem as much in Florida but when you're up north and is a very cold the shopping cart handle I would imagine it gets quite cold also this is something nice to put on there to have a little barrier against the cold of the shopping cart right this is very simple I've used just two pieces of fabric I am using batting on the inside of mine you could just use two pieces of fabric and skip the batting but I like that extra cushion and I also like that extra barrier and protection because okay two pieces of fabric what if over time something is on there what if something sneezed on it and it's wet and it goes through those two pieces of fabric when I have that batting in there it's gonna give that extra barrier against anything that might be on there I'm also using a little hook and loop or velcro to hold mine on you could use snaps instead if you'd like but I just chose to use one full length of velcro if your velcro isn't long enough to go all the way to the end you can just go ahead and cut a couple little pieces maybe three or four pieces and pop it on there and it's gonna work fine with this whole piece like this this is a little bit extra protection for if you have children with you to stop them from peeling that off because you know when you turn your head for three seconds to go grab that head of lettuce your kid is gonna try to rip this right off you can put snaps on it and that would help deter the children you might want to put extra caps on maybe ten of them on there you could go a little bit less just divide it all up and see what it feels comfortable for you if you don't have any type of batting in your house you can put anything in between here you go with some flannel some fleece you can put an old hand towel from doing the kitchen dishes and such you can use stabilizer and just go ahead and interface or stabilize both pieces but once again I like that extra a little bit of squish so let's get ahead and stop chatting and let's start making this where my velcro I just happen to have this big roll of velcro it is 5/8 inches I would suggest not going down too small I wouldn't go down to I don't know how small velcro gets but I would definitely try to stay at least a half inch to 3/4 of an inch if you only have an inch you can go ahead but it's gonna take a little bit of effort to get that off and you could also go ahead and trim your inch down in half you can go ahead and just mark a line down the halfway point with a ruler and then just trim it up with your scissors or a rotary cutter a quarter inch is going to work but with that quarter inch it's going to hold it on yes but it's not going to be very secure if you have small children so if it's just for you and your husband or your mother or your grandmother or something then I wouldn't worry about it too much using the 5/8 it allowed me to have enough room so when I went ahead and I rolled this around it was easy for me to just pop it on there and I had a really good chance on hitting it and not getting it all kinds of wonky and crooked you're gonna need about 19 inches but I wouldn't cut this until we get to a certain point and I'll show you where because if you cut it too short or too well too long is never a problem of course but we don't want to waste any of our velcro so if we're gonna go ahead and cut this after we get everything sewn together and flipped around so that we know that we're cutting it to the exact right length that we need now I'm choosing to use two different fun novelty print cotton fabrics I have some cows here and a little bit of farm life and I'm using cotton batting but as I said you can use anything you want in the center in any type of batting so if you just have some polyester or some wool or bamboo or whatever go ahead and use that it's a great use of your scraps for your outer fabrics if you don't have any cotton fabrics you can go ahead and use t-shirt material you can use fleece or flannel anything you have that you can use as a material that can easily be washed because every time you use this as you go out shopping you're going to want to bring it home and pop it into the washer and dryer to make sure it's clean and safe and ready to go for the next time we don't want any of those little germs hanging around at the house and these all three of them are cut the same I cut them six inches wide and 20 inches in length what I want to do is I want to take these and place them right side together I'm gonna match them all up nice and neat then I'm taking my batting and I'm gonna put it right on top I get that lined up just a little bit better I'm not worried about right side or wrong side with my batting it's all gonna be the same it's just inside our little cart cuff so it's not gonna matter too much so I have this all lined up I want to put a few pins in it you can put Clips around the edge if you want but then as you're sewing you're gonna have to go ahead and remove those clips I just pop a few pins in it then they can stay there until I'm all done sewing now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna use a quarter inch seam allowance around the outside if you feel a little bit more comfortable I gave you a little bit of wiggle room here that if you want you to go ahead and do a three-eighths inch seam allowance now before we get sewing let's just have a little chat about shopping cart handles now I'm base like I said I base this off with one that we have our local Walmart here if you're in another country I don't know the size of your shopping carts and I don't know what your handles look like so before you make this if you can go ahead and pop into your store and just measure measure the length of your handle from the bar to the bar write that measurement down and then you want to measure around the actual handle itself and get that measurement and then I would go ahead and I would depending on your seam allowance you would have to add a little to your seat to your length and then to your width the length is in tipping of a deal so if it comes a little bit short on the end then you're gonna be okay because you're not gonna really put your fingers all the way at the end there so if you want you can just add a half inch to that length you found and that'll give you that extra space when you turn everything inside out if you use a quarter inch seam allowance now when you go around this way I would add an inch to it to an inch and a half because remember we are going to be overlapping it with our velcro now it's not gonna matter if this is a little bit too loose on your handle but it's gonna be a problem if it's too tight and you can't get it on so you can even go up to two inches and that way you know you've got plenty for your overhang when you're flipping it over you've got your seam allowance and everything like that I'm gonna leave my turning on the side here you can leave it all the way at the end but remember your guys put your hand all the way in and pull it all the way out if I leave it on the side then I only have to pull out half and I pull out half and I won't have that whole big bunch that I'm trying to pull through so my quarter inch seam allowance has a 2.0 stitch length and I'm gonna stitch all the way around I'm gonna leave an opening about an inch and a half you can go all the way up to three inches if you want just to get your hand in there to turn everything around and flip it I do back stitch right here at the beginning just to give a little extra security so when I'm in there and I'm trying to pull the fabric out I'm not going to tear those stitches now if you're worried about any of your layers shifting while you're stitching this you can go ahead and use a walking foot that'll allow all the layers to just go ahead and feed evenly and you won't have to worry about much shifting at all I always like to trim my corners about an eighth of an inch to a quarter of an inch away from the seam line that's gonna reduce some of that extra bulk so that we can have some nice-looking corners and they won't get all rounded and funky looking you just want to make sure that you don't trim all the way up to where your stitches are now if you did use your three-eighths inch seam allowance you can go ahead and trim it down to about a quarter of an inch that way you don't have too much bulk and your seams when we flip it around because we are going to be sewing velcro down on this and we don't want to worry about having an extra heavy seam there in our seam allowance okay so what we're gonna do is we're gonna put our hand in between the two cotton fabrics that are right sides together if we go between our blue fabric here and our batting when we turn it we're gonna have the batting and outside of this fabric as the outside of our Curt cuff and that's not going to work so you want to make sure we go through our two right sides together pieces of cotton you should be able to put your fingers in there if not your whole hand and just pull it out if you have any struggle you can go ahead and use some hemostats to pull it out you just want to be careful that you're not gonna do any damage to your hole here you don't want to tear your seams or rip your fabric because you're just pulling it so tough I'm just using a plastic crochet hook anything that has a dull end to it if you can use it to go ahead and push out your corners you can just use your finger if you want that works too you want to do the best job you can but if you're not getting exact perfect corners it's okay you can use the tip of your seam ripper to just kind of like pry it out just a little bit but you got to be careful because it's really easy to tear the fabric when you're doing that just gonna go through and give a little bit of a kind of roll out with my fingers to make sure that the front stays on the front and the back stays on the back it really does become interchangeable I have it set up that this striped fabric is the outside so it would go like this but you could easily because way we put the velcro on turn it around and you would have it to be reversible I'm gonna take this over to my pressing station and I'm just gonna go ahead and press all of these edges so that they lay nice and flat when I come over to the hole here I'm just gonna go ahead and tuck my seams in and make sure I line it up the best to my ability so that everything looks nice I don't want to have it so that it comes down too far on either side give it a nice press if you want you to put a couple clips on here to hold it in place now you have two options you can go ahead and lay your velcro down and you can stitch all the way around the top stitch it while you're putting your velcro on but I taught my velcro a little bit away from the edge I prefer to top stitch around it and then put my velcro on and then I could line my velcro up right along that top stitching edge so it's not any of that roughness hanging over the edge so if it does happen to spin on the handle if the kids are playing with it or something they're not gonna have that rough edge touching them I'm gonna start just before my hole and I'm gonna stick with an eighth of an inch seam allowance well top stitching and I'm gonna stick with a my 2.0 you can use a matching thread a contrasting thread you can do fancy stitches anything you wish you your main point is to get this little hole that we have our turning holes closed up and then if we go ahead and top stitch all the way around it when we wash it in the washing machine it's gonna hold this shape and it's not gonna get all kind of wonky along the edges and then I just back stitch a little bit at the end now we can go ahead and measure our velcro or hook in this or hook and loop tape depending on what you're using now I'm gonna go from where my stitch line is here right top stitch so I'm gonna go just inside this end and I'm gonna lay it out all the way to just inside this end you can go ahead and put a little clip on it to hold it in place if you want most times you're cutting both pieces at the same time if you're not you can cut them one at a time then just lay it out flat and then trim the end you can find things of velcro like this at Walmart or on Amazon and you can pick a velcro just about anywhere I know Michaels has their only type of brand so and you can also use your discount coupons at Joanne's and Michaels so you take advantage of that now we're only gonna be putting down one at a time I'm going to go ahead and use some clips just to hold this on pinning through velcro is not always the easiest this is actually a soft velcro that is meant for making baby items and such but I think it's gonna work fine for the way we're gonna use this I think it's gonna hold everything just tonight just nice it's not like it's got to hold anything up and keep it from falling apart right it's just got to stay on the shopping carts while I'm shopping the real trick to this is to remember to take it off the shopping cart when you leave the building and if you find that you do have a little extra at the end you can just go ahead and trim it off which means we'll probably have to trim our other piece too when we get to it now I'm just going to start close to the end just personal preference you can start anywhere you want and I'm going to stitch about 1/8 to 1/4 of an inch along the edge now this is the soft part so it's no big deal when you get to the hook part up here it has this little border around it so you want to be stitching right into that border there it's very difficult to stitch through all of these hooks your thread is gonna end up going like this instead of being down flat but when you're holding it you'll be able to tell right away so you just kind of want to stick in that eighth of an inch area and just stitch right along all of these little perkily hooks along here and we're going to stitch around the entire length now if you were doing this in pieces then of course you would have to stitch each piece individually just go ahead and you can either eyeball it or measure it out so that they're all separated nice and evenly and remember when you do it in little pieces you're gonna have to match it when we do the other side when I do one long strip I can easily just put the other strip on and it's gonna match automatically you want to try to stitch as best as you can in a straight line because remember your stitching is going to show on the other side here now the whole point of this softer velcro is that these edges in these corners are really soft this part that it's the tape that it's put on too is not all that rough but if yours is really hard you can always go ahead and curve and turn you know just cut a little corners off here and just curve it a little so you're not too worried about that but it's going to be underneath on the cart it's I'm gonna be at the bottom of the handle you're not gonna really run into it on the ends and stuff so now we had to decide where we're gonna put our other piece let me just measure since I trimmed off a little of it before to make sure okay so now our next piece we can't just put it here because then you're gonna have this weird part hanging off the bottom so we want to bring this over and we want to overlap it so we want to make sure that our piece is going there now of course I have decided that my yellow is gonna be on the outside so I'm gonna want to put my velcro on here on the opposite side of my blue so that when I bring it over you can go ahead and test it out before you sew it to make sure it's gonna be on there right so if I lay it down face down from the piece that I already puts this is where my velcro is I can see where it stitched on I want to put it on this side okay we're gonna do the same thing we're just gonna put this down and line it up along our little top stitching line you can just put two clips on if you want now we're going to do the same thing I remember we're going to try to stitch along that taped edge if yours is anything like mine one size wider than the other just do the best you can you just want to make sure it's nice and secure and along the edge there there you go all set now this one I did the straight line this one I did a little bit of egg zig-zag stitch I'm not sure if you can see that but I put a really tight narrow zigzag stitch on so if you prefer to use a zigzag or you want to go ahead and use a straight stitch either way is going to work go ahead and test it out there you go you got your cart cuff all set to go now what I like to do I fold it in half and I fold this end up and I fold this end up and mostly because of the fact you have all that velcro in there and you have the batting and then I like to go ahead and just store this in a little Ziploc baggie this is the sandwich size now going to go ahead and keep this in my car or keep it in my purse and it'll be all set to go and when I take it off with a shopping cart when I'm done shopping I can go ahead and fold it up and put it back into this little baggie and this can go right out to the laundry room so when you're ready to do your laundry you can pop it and get it washed so you're not having to handle it any more than you have to once it's come off your shopping cart thank you for joining me today and working on our cart cuffs I hope you enjoyed this tutorial if you have any questions please leave them down in the comments now when you go out shopping you can feel a little bit safer knowing that you have a cover to put on your shopping cart handles and your hands aren't going right onto it even if you're wearing gloves to take food off the shelves and stuff like that it's still nice to have these on your shopping cart okay everyone you go out there and be safe when you're shopping and I'll see you next time bye my daughter and I took out the cart cuff for a little trial this is a SAM shopping cart as you can see it's a double occupancy for the kids so it is a little bit shorter but there's still plenty of room for you to put your hands on but look at how easy it is to just peel that off with just a couple fingers you don't have to touch it very much it goes on nice and super simple and easy it's a very windy day there's a nice little Sun lotion just grab the corner and it can just peel right up and you don't have to touch the whole thing so it's great if you have gloves on or not then you can just fold it over onto itself and put it in your little Ziploc baggie

Channel: RsIslandCrafts - Robin

Views: 14,991

Rating: 4.9211044 out of 5

Keywords: artfire, bits and pieces, calculator tape, cape coral, crafting, diy, fabric, fabric scraps, florida, foundation piecing, leftovers, quilting, recycle, reduce, reuse, robin lalone, rsislandcrafts, scrap sewing projects, scraps, sewing, strip piecing, what to do with your fabric scraps, zbesties, cart cuff, shopping cart handle cover, shopping cart handle cover tutorial, velcro

Id: eXKfeZYzrHk

Length: 23min 33sec (1413 seconds)

Published: Fri May 15 2020