Ryder, bless his tiny trouble-making heart, has recently become very interested in toilet paper.  It started out harmlessly enough… he would gently touch the roll, and sometimes unroll it a little bit before moving on to something more exciting.  That quickly progressed, and now, he grabs the end and strings it all over creation.  OR, he unrolls it a bit, and then shreds it into a million pieces… but not before making sure to ingest some of it.  When we try to shoo him away, he bats his eyes, and holds it up to his nose, making a cute little snuffling sound as if to say, “But Mama, I just needed to blow my nose!”  (Blowing his nose is a new handy skill he picked up after being a veritable snot factory for the last several weeks.  I say “handy” with a grain of salt, because sometimes he blows without a tissue, and sometimes he uses it as an excuse to TP my house.)

Several months ago, I suggested to Ryan that we invest in one of those toilet paper “locks” so that he wouldn’t be able to unroll it at all.  He totally shot me down.  Fast forward to yesterday, and now it’s a grand idea.  :)  However, I decided that it would be much more fun (and probably cheaper) to try to construct something myself.  So I did!

I checked my ever-growing fabric stash, and found a bit of leftover hand towel from my Hooded Towel project (thanks to Beckie at Infarrantly Creative).  It doesn’t match my bathroom at all, but at this point, it’s totally function over form, ya know?  I grabbed a new roll of TP from my stash in the garage and measured the length and circumference of it.

I added a 1/2 inch to each measurement because I intended to fold over the edges and use 1/4 inch seam allowances.  However, it dawned on me that using thick terrycloth might make that a little tricky, and not so attractive.  I decided to use an overcast stitch on my machine instead, just to keep the three raw edges from fraying.  (This was a trick I discovered while working with all that fleece over Christmas!)  A zig-zag stitch would work too.

Then I sewed on some velcro… One two-inch strip on the “flap” part (with the pre-finished edge), and one that was approximately eight inches to accommodate an ever-shrinking roll of TP.

It’s not the fanciest or most attractive thing I’ve ever made (and apparently I still need to trim a few stray threads!), but hopefully this will do the trick… at least until he figures out how to get this thing off!