Jack Kahn of Its All About Your Health is featuring DIY Natural Bedding in his radio show. His show is deliberately short, only 2 minutes, long enough to suit his purpose of providing food for thought. As he says on his website, “The purpose of the program is to get people to think, ask questions, and to help them avoid making mistakes, or wrong decisions, regarding their health.”

Its All About Your Health airs around the country. Let us know if you heard our being mentioned.

DIY your own wool topper with these supplies and instructions.

We have been looking forward to sharing this DIY option to you for a long time and it is here! We include helpful details like what type of fabric you want and why and how to find free fabric that would work well. Our practicing has chosen the right size needle and the strongest twine.  The prototyping is done for you. Now create!

Using a very easy pattern, few supplies and minimal labor, you can create your own wool topper. Locally grown, carefully sourced wool could top your mattress, providing you with a smooth, flexible surface to sleep atop.

A wool topper pattern is available by itself as well as a wool topper kit, which includes the pattern as well as supplies. New supplies have appeared in the Supply section just for this project: twine and a 5″ tufting needle.

If you make a topper, please send us a picture! We would love to showoff your handiwork for you!

A lot of inquiries have come through lately for woolly bolas, small wool balls. They are lightweight and rather fluffy twisted bits of wool fiber.

They are made fairly simply:

1. Sheep are pastured and cared for.
2. Sheep are sheared.
3. The wool is washed.
4. The wool is picked by a machine to remove the burs and other stubborn vegetation.
5. The wool is usually carded, a machine which brushes the fibers into a sheet, untangling their knots and smoothing them out to make batts or rovings or the start of many other wool projects.  However, when the carding machine runs backwards, instead of brushing and layering the fibers into sheets, it twists the fibers into small wool balls commonly dubbed bolas.

We feature woolly bolas both in our Wool category and our Supplies category. They would make great stuffing for a pillow or any craft you need stuffed. Since they are lightweight, you will need only 1/2 as much as you would wool batting.

Why are they named bolas? Bola means ball, in a few different languages. Did anyone else beside thinking of the weapon, think of the spider who makes silk bolas to catch his prey with. I guess those nature radio shows I listened to as a youth did leave some lasting learning.

Creativity drives us here at DIY Natural Bedding.  Sometimes we create because we must; sometimes because we see a need for an item; other times because we like to make a choice not just logically but tactically; sometimes because we need to feel the freedom that in creativity is limitless; because we have time to fill. I know that you are a creative crowd too, because here you are, on a DIY site, searching for something you can create.

We want to help you create, repurpose, and invent, no matter your level of inspiration, motivation, or skill so we have created a new menu in the shop: Custom. This menu will give you three tools to help you in the planning stages of your project.  Use them and feel free to contact us with any questions.

Our Custom Sewing page gives you details on our sewing work. As with our ticking, we go to either extreme and in between: We can supply you with fabric or we can sew up and stuff your fabric for you or most interesting for us, we can create you an entirely new design never conceived before.

Our Custom Latex Cuts will give you the price of a piece of latex you want us to cut for you.  We can cut standard angles or even your odd shapes like for a boat mattress or a crescent nursing pillow. If you want to cut your own, check out the Clearance section for a variety of depths and firmnesses.

Our Custom Pillow Fill Weight Calculator is a very useful tool if you want to know how much fill a shape.  Are you making a bed pillow, a dog bed, a bean bag chair, a pincushion? With three simple steps, you can know how much fill you might need for your project. Enter in your dimensions, pick your shape, and choose your type of fill to see a total weight provided.  Square cubic inch measurements are also provided for your mathematical pleasure.

Happy DIYing.

The difference between our previous size and standard sizes is small, only 2-3 inches depending on the pillow label; however, we wanted to give you those extra inches that you might be accustomed to.

Funny thing is shredded latex pillow sizes are not standard, mostly nowhere. Each company has their own standard size, for example here are the first three numbers a web search produced: 17″ x 25″, 16″ x 25″, 18″ x 24″. Despite the industry’s inconsistent variations on latex pillow sizes, since we offer cases alone without fill and since we want your bed setup to be as aesthetically pleasing as possible, we will standardize our sizes to the above numbers.

We still can make any pillow size you like. If you have a pillow of our old size and you would like to purchase a second matching size, let us know and we’ll sew you a new case for no extra charge.

And if you need anything custom project sewed, we’re happy to help.

Today I spoke with Debra Lynn Dadd on her radio show Toxic Free Radio.  Back in 1984, she started writing books on toxic-free living.  To complement those seven books, she now hosts a radio show with daily interviews to people providing natural information and options.

Here is a link to listen to our archived show.