I recently got a little bit over excited by an email from Groupon about waterproof, washable dog beds. In my excitement I didn’t follow the cardinal rule of shopping online. I didn’t check the measurements of the dog bed I bought. Historically, the internet has underestimated the size of my dog in every respect so I’ve usually had to buy XL things for Apple despite her only weighing about 25 kg.

Not this time…

This bed was FOUR feet long and THREE feet wide. Honestly, it was ridiculous. Apple looked like a tiny pea in the middle of a sea of bed. In fact it was so big that she wouldn’t accept that it was a bed for her, she would get on it if I asked her to but she’d jump straight off 5 seconds later and lie down as far away as possible from it. It was also massively overstuffed and because of the waterproof material it had a lot of air trapped in it, this made the surface uneven and it was difficult for her to manoeuvre on it.

So long story short, it needed to either become something useful or be sent back. I’m notoriously bad at remembering to return items that I’ve bought from the internet and the idea of trying to wrestle it back into the packaging brought tears to my eyes.

I decided to make it into something useful!

This turned out to be more straightforward than I was expecting. I measured Apple’s crate to work out how much of the bed I could use and suddenly realised that if I cut it down the middle widthways I would have a bed that fit perfectly in Apple’s crate. I then realised that if I bought a large zip I could turn the redundant half into another washable, waterproof bed 😀

The first thing I did was remove the inner pillow and put it to one side.

I then folded the cover in half and pressed it down the line I wanted to cut.

I cut the bed in half:

And put the end without the zip to one side. I turned the other end inside out and sewed the open end up with a straight stitch.

Then I grabbed the pillow and cut a whole through the middle of that as well.

I pulled out a full bin bag of stuffing before I could find the other side of the pillow to cut through both sides of the material. I put this bin bag to one side while I decided how much stuffing would be required for one dog bed.

I laid the pillow on top of the new cover to gauge it for size, then sewed up one side and cut off the excess material.

I turned the cover right side out and put the pillow inside. It fit perfectly and looked great when all zipped up.

Apple patiently waited on her bed the whole time I was doing this (with a few grumbles)

The final bed fits perfectly in her crate and she’s no longer scared of it!