Kids' Cutlery Tray: A Tutorial

When Anna suggested spicing up our kitchens, this project immediately came to mind. Inspired by this, I had made one for myself a while back and hadn't gotten around to blogging about it. After months of use, I can say it's a hit at our house. The jumble of spoons, forks and knives gave me a headache every time I opened the drawer, and now K can help put her cutlery away and knows exactly where to go to find what she needs. Now that everything is organized, she seems to feel less compelled to dump everything out of the drawer once or twice a day-- I'm appreciating that, too. Because then I have to decide exactly how dirty I think the kitchen floor is at that moment and whether I feel the need to wash alllll of it again. Or just throw it all back in the drawer and call it an exercise in immunity-building.

Other things to love about this:

- the fabrics can be as plain or as exciting as you like.

- you can pull the whole thing out when you have kids over and take it to the table

- it costs very little to make

- you can choose the size that best fits your drawer

If you'd like to make one, all you need are:

- two clean, uncrumpled cereal/snack boxes 

- two coordinating fabrics, roughly twice the width and length of your boxes

- scissors

- tape

- white poster board or card stock
- glue stick
- clear contact paper

You'll want to choose one cereal box that will be the main tray, and a smaller box that fits inside of it to section it.

Make sure the larger box fits in the drawer you want to use and is also large enough for the cutlery to fit inside with some wiggle room. I cut my insert piece like so.

Cut away one face of the larger box and use tape to reinforce the edges. Trim the edges of the cut-away face so that you can use it to line the box later on. Cut a similar liner for the insert.

The next step is to cover the oustide of your trays and it serves two purposes. It provides a white background to go underneath your fabric so that you won't see packaging through it, and it adds sturdiness to the trays. I used white bristol board; you can also use card stock or poster board. Tape around all of the edges. If you feel like your cardboard is already plenty sturdy, you could use a light coat of white spray paint. 

Lay your tray onto a piece of fabric and mark the corners.

Trim the excess fabric from the corners, leaving enough of an edge to tape and/or fold.

Press the edges to create creases in the fabric at the corners. Tape one side of the corner to the tray, the other will fold over...

Like so.  Trim and tape to the bottom of the box. Repeat all the way around.

And do the same thing for the smaller tray. By placing the tray on the fabric and ironing the lines to follow, it's not hard to line it up nicely. Pinky swear.

At this point the boxes are wrapped in fabric, so we move to the liners. I took a photo of a set of K's cutlery on a light background so that I could print them at about actual size. Alternately you could go low-tech and trace around a knife, fork and spoon on cute scrap paper. Or freehand it. Endless wild and crazy possibilities.

Trim bristol board to match the size of the liners.

Cut the printed cutlery out and apply with a dab of glue stick. Laminate with clear contact paper. I used the insert tray for knives, since we don't have or use as many, and that leaves the fork and spoon areas flexible. We have more spoons than anything else.

Drop the liners in, and the insert tray in, too. Ta-da! Serious cuteness every time you open that drawer. A pop of color. (Get it? Pop Garden fabric?)

Then let your 3 3/4 year-old and a bestie try it out.

A fun sorting game.

Works just as will with two.

All done. Well, these are the pieces that were clean and coordinated. We must coordinate. At least for blogging.

Thanks, Anna, for helping me get this off my to-do list! And since I had one for myself, I happen to have a co-blogger who was not-so-subtly hinting that she needed one. May be appearing in a drawer near her soon...