I’m really enjoying using my new scroll bar frame, but when I bought it I decided to not get it with the bottom lap piece. I’m going to be travelling with it so I didn’t want to end up carrying anything too heavy, and I wanted to trial it on its own at first. After a little while, I found it was a little tricky to balance upright on my lap (I’m usually stitching reclined) without having to hold my arms in a weird position, I need them to be completely relaxed as I’m working to prevent pain. So, as I was at my Mum’s house (who is the original Handy Little Gadget), I came up with an idea for a simple wooden frame to act as an adjustable stand and prop the frame up on my lap, no matter what angle I’m sitting at. After a bit of discussion about what materials Mum had lying around, we came up with this design – all it needed was three pieces of thin wood, a drill to make holes the same diameter as the bolts in the scroll bars, and two screws to hold the bottom piece on. It took less than 10 minutes to put together (including cutting the wood to size), and it works really well. I like how I can tip the frame up higher or lower as I’m working to keep myself from getting locked into one position for too long. It also can fold almost completely flat against the back of the scroll bar frame, so it is easy to travel with. Chalk up another win for Team Handy Little Gadget. 🙂
Making my scroll bar frame even more user-friendly
on December 27, 2014
with 2 Comments
2 Responses
Donna Moncharsh
Very clever- but I do have a question– would you make a separate one for each length of scroll bars, just a separate base for each set or do you have same way to clever idea for the base piece of wood? Regardless, this is definitely my prject for the day–thanks for such a clever solution!
Dana
Thanks very much for your comment Donna! Yes, I did end up making another set of scroll bars about a week later (you can see the post here – http://peacockandfig.com/2015/01/making-custom-scroll-bars-for-my-frame/), which I was planning to do. So, before I left my mum’s house (where I made the little stand), she also cut me a long piece of wood that’s 24″ long as that was how long I was going to make my new scroll bars. So basically all I have to do if I’m going to use the 24″ bars instead of the 18″ bars, I just unscrew the little screws holding the longer middle piece of the stand in place, and replace it with the longer piece of wood. So the two side pieces are exactly the same, it’s just the centre piece that gets switched out to match the length of the scroll bars. Does that make sense? If not, let me know and I add in some photos of how to switch out the central stand piece into this blog post. Have a great day, enjoy your project! 🙂