These DIY doll beds are made from plastic bins, decorated to look like beds but leaving lots of room to store a growing collection of doll clothing. My favourite part? When your child outgrows dolls, you get a new plastic bin for your storage room. 

I have a child who has trouble falling asleep. She’s often up until 11, 12 or even 1 am, and she’s been that way for as long as I can remember.

I have talked to doctors, chiropractors and naturopaths about it. We have tried magnesium and melatonin. And yes, of course we have tried earlier bed times and earlier wake times.

One doctor asked me what time she falls asleep. “Between 11 and I”, I replied.

“And what time does she get up?”

“Between 8 and 9.”

He quickly did the math and then announced that she gets enough sleep for a child her age; I should stop worrying,  he said, because she just has a different inner clock than other kids.

Ok, fine, maybe she gets enough sleep — but what about me?! My two-year-old doesn’t share her clock. My five-year-old doesn’t share her clock. No matter what time I’m up, I have a child up too. Unless it’s three in the morning and I’m eating ice cream from the carton, watching reruns of Fresh Prince on Netflix with zombie eyes.

Must. Not. Give up. “Me” time.

To be honest, it’s not as bad as it used to be. I’ve learned to live without my 8-10 hours of beauty sleep, and really, a nine-year-old that gets up 53 times a night to tell you what’s happening in a book that she’s already read 869 times doesn’t require the same amount of energy as a two-year-old who is big enough to reach the carton of eggs in the refrigerator.

Christmas is the only time that I truly regret having kids that don’t sleep better. Because how am I supposed to make gifts when one of them could walk into the room at any moment?

This year, I tried setting firm rules: if you leave your bedroom after 10 for any reason, I said, Christmas is cancelled. It worked pretty well, and it was blissful: two more whole hours to myself, every single night. And I wisely used that time to watch Poldark each evening before pulling out the sewing machine at midnight.

Don’t judge. I know you understand. You know what it’s like to have a long day and have 600 things to do once the kids are in bed but you just. can’t. move. And Poldark! How do I pull myself away from that?

Somehow, though, I managed to finish off the gifts about a week before Christmas (which is probably a record for me to be honest). I made two dolls beds, one for each of the Waldorf dolls that I made for Christmas 2013 and then fixed up last year.

I found the tutorial on the Beneath the Rowan Tree blog — it’s such a genius idea. The beds are made from plastic bins, and even though they’re decorated to look like beds, the bin is still available to store a growing collection of doll clothing. Brilliant, right?

And I’m sharing how I did it so that you can make your own.

(1) The Bin

I chose bins that were short, though I suspect that any bin size would work. My only real concern was to make sure that the bed was long and wide enough to fit each doll comfortably. (I ended up stashing the tops in our “where did all these lids come from?!” bin down in the basement. The mattress is stiff enough that it doesn’t need any support.)

(2) The Bed Skirt

My first step was to sew a skirt to cover the bed. The bed on the BTRT blog has an adorable dust ruffle (and there is a quick tutorial on the blog post) — but at 2am, sewing a super long piece of fabric with casing for elastic seemed like too much work. I did a more fitted skirt instead.

Don’t think lazy — think modern chic. Lazy chic?

To be honest, I think the dust ruffle would have been much, much less work, because I ended up adding darts to my fabric to make it fit the curves of the bin better. Yeah, a dust ruffle would have been far easier. I wasn’t thinking clearly though — you have to remember that it was after midnight, and that I was emotionally raw from Poldark, so I wasn’t thinking clearly. Especially after finishing that last episode. Wow.

(3) A Mattress and a Pillow

So what was next? Well, after I finished Season 1 of Poldark, I needed to satisfy my insatiable need for more British drama, which led me to rewatch Downton Abbey. Didn’t I stay up all night watching Downton Abbey last year when I made those gorgeous amber wrap bracelets? It seems that spending the wee hours with the Crawley family is a bit of a Christmas tradition.

After a night or two of Lady Mary and the Dowager Countess, I was relaxed enough to continue on with the doll beds. With the bedskirt was finished, I started working on the mattresses.

I pulled out two pieces of foam that I had purchased for the beds. I got them from a specialty foam store which cut the pieces down to size for me; all I needed to do was add a pretty cover, which I made using this DIY from the Ana White site.

Warning: it’s one of those tutorials where you just have to blindly follow along and trust that it will work out beautifully. And it did. Honestly, the finished corners look so darn good that I didn’t want to cover them up with a fitted sheet, so I skipped the sheets entirely and moved on right to the doll pillows.

Pillows are crazy easy, of course. I dare say that you could manage those even if you were watching that horrid Downton special that ruined Christmas for all of England in 2012. Like I did.

Oh Masterpiece Theatre: why must you hurt us so?

Sigh. I need see another shot of a mattress cover corner.

I feel better now.

(4) Doll Quilt

I was so, so excited to make the quilts. I’ve been wanting to make a quilt for years, and this was my first try. Okay, technically I didn’t even do actual quilting stitches overtop (because tick tock, tick tock), but I still sewed a bunch of squares together and that was delightful enough for me. I probably broke all sorts of quilting rules but I don’t even care. Seriously. I have to jump on the quilting bandwagon for real.

Once the squares were sewn together, I laid it on top of an old fleece blanket that I cut down, and then I finished it all off with plain fabric on the back. I followed this tutorial by Cluck Cluck Sew here.

My one regret is not making the doll quilts bigger — they both could have used an extra row on both the top and the side — but I don’t know if I would have had a piece large enough in my fabric scrap pile for the backing if the quilt was any bigger. Meh. They work, right?

(5) Doll Clothes

I had originally planned to sew a whole bunch of doll clothes so that the bins wouldn’t be empty when the girls opened them on Christmas morning. I even cut out a bunch of pieces for the shirts and pants. Then, about half way through December, I realized that my project was taking a lot longer than I expected, given how much time at the beginning I had to dedicate to Poldark. Sigh. I’m such a sucker for dark, brooding Heathcliff-like characters, much to the chagrin of pretty much all of my friends.

I decided that instead of staying up an extra hour or two each night to sew doll clothes and enjoy the sunrise, I would just go to a used clothing store for children and buy adorable clothes in the clearance newborn section.

Yikes. What a terrible folding job. Clearly I did not take Marie Kondo’s advice to heart.

Anyway, I had great luck at the clothing store, like always. It’s such an inexpensive way to get doll clothes and I highly recommend it if your family includes an 18 inch doll or two. I suggest that you bring your child’s doll along so that you can pick the clothes that work best, but I don’t worry too much about the perfect fit. It’s not like a doll is going to trip over a hem, right? However, if you do bring the doll to the store, I feel that I should warn you that you will be that crazy lady with a doll in the shopping cart, trying clothes on her and chattering to her excitedly when you find something that’s just perfect. It really is best if you can avoid talking to the doll while you’re there. I’m not so good at that.

Oh well, it’s not like I’m going to see those people again, right? And now our two beloved dolls have brand new wardrobes tucked away in their own little beds, where they can get their full 8-10 hours of beauty sleep each night.

I’m so jealous.