Quilt Ladder DIY

Have you noticed the sudden surge of interest for quilt ladders? Well, I have. It seems they've been popping up everywhere recently! and I for one, *love* the micro trend. I first started noticing them while browsing Pinterest for antique quilts; a pastime which I spend far, far too much time doing... (you can see a few examples on my Quilting board). So I added it to our ever growing home DIY wish to-do list.

A few months passes, oh and a year! with still no quilt ladder, then I noticed @saracecilquilts on Instagram set up a business making dreamy custom built quilt ladders, and sure enough all my favourite quilter's were getting one! (shame she's based in the U.S. so I wasn't going to be getting one of those! *insert crying face here*). Robin eventually caught on to the idea, so we got to making, finally! - with a couple of new tool purchases of course :-/ somehow he always manages to need a new tool for whatever project we do... hmm... I guess it's like us quilter's need new fabric for every project, right? ;-)

He wanted to do a 'practice' one first so we wouldn't waste money on wood (which is a lot more expensive here than the U.S.) So we made a mini quilt ladder with just two rungs, and a good job we did as we put the bottom rung too low, dohh! I looooove the wood stain effect on this one though, it took me four coats to get this look. I think it sits nicely in our living space and it's the perfect height to not overpower the room. 

The next quilt ladder was the big one, 6ft tall with four rungs. This one went together a lot more smoothly I think. We measured the distance between the rungs again, and spaced them evenly. Robin also used leftover scraps of wood to make plugs to fill the screw holes on the outside, which were then sanded down (on the previous ladder I just used wood filler, which if you paint - you can't see it, so it doesn't matter. But on the wood stain the filler is a slightly different colour, so shows though). 

I decided to paint this ladder white for our bedroom, as we have beautiful antique chest of drawers so I didn't want to use the wood stain and have two clashing wood colour's next to each other? We also have a white bed-frame and neutral curtains so it all ties in quite well hopefully ;-) Ok, can I now just say how much I love them and how clever my fiancé Robin is!!? So, so so happy with them. Thank YOU Robin! Now I just need to finish of a couple more quilts to fill them up, can you believe I don't have enough!?