Disney Cruise Fish Extenders

We decided to take a Disney cruise for a family vacation.  Well, to be honest, my husband's cousin posted that she was going on facebook, inviting the rest of her family to come along.  And of course, my husband, being the Disney nut that he is, took her up on her offer.  Anyway he booked the cruise and stopped there.  Thankfully, one of my childhood friends posted on Facebook that SHE went on a Disney cruise, so I asked her for some pointers.  She gave me a ton of great tips, but also clued me into this thing called a "Fish Extender."

So what the heck is a Fish Extender?  Each cabin door has a fish clip used to deliver messages to each room.  Apparently there are people who can somehow afford to take several Disney cruises in a lifetime and organize little gift exchanges with other folks on their cruise.  They created this concept where you hang something on your fish clip so other people can deliver these little gifts.  Voila, the Fish Extender.  You could use a small tote or a Christmas stocking, but the most popular seems to be this thing that resembles a hanging mail organizer.  As it turns out, there are people who make and sell these things on Etsy... for about 10 times the cost of materials.  And since I already have a good deal of quilting scraps, I decided to make my own.  And since I was already breaking out my sewing machine, etc., I offered to make one for my cousin and her family as well.

These are pretty simple to make... you could make one out of two fat quarters.  I mixed and matched a little more, but here's the general concept to make one Fish Extender, or FE:

Supplies for one FE-
One 1/2 inch wooden dowel, cut to 9"
Two fat quarters
1/4 yd lightweight fusible interfacing
One 4 yd package of single fold bias tape
Thread (I used black for both, to match the bias tape)
Scrap materials for appliques
Approx 1 yd of ribbon (1/2 yd of each color)
2-4 acrylic beads
1 bottle of Tulip fabric paint

For the base, I folded one fat quarter in half, right side out, and ironed in a crease.  (Fold it so that you get the longest possible rectangle.  This gave me a back of approximately 22 inches long- a typical fat quarter is 18" x 22".)  Then, I opened it up and ironed a single layer of lightweight fusible interfacing to one side of the fat quarter and folded it back along the ironed crease.  (So I had a sandwich with the right side of the material facing out and the interfacing on the inside.)   I used a rotary cutter to square my edges and cut it down to an 8 inch wide rectangle.  (Most of the recommendations on the Disney boards is not to exceed 8 inches wide so as not to obstruct the doorway.)

To make the pockets, I cut down another fat quarter into rectangles that measured 12 inches across and 5 inches tall.  (You could make them as short as 8 inches across or up to maybe about 16 inches across, but I wanted 1 inch pleats on my pockets and needed an extra two inches on either side of my applique to make that happen.)  But for now, iron those suckers flat and set them aside.

To make the Mickey Mouse ear appliques, I just cut three circles.  I have a Go! Baby fabric cutter from Accuquilt so I used the medium and small circles, but you can trace jars or whatever else you have handy.  (These circles are 3" in diameter for the head and 2" for the ears.)  You could cut a character out of a print, make hearts, use patches, or anything else you want... I eyeballed the suckers to center them and used a zig zag stitch right over the top to applique them to the pockets.  Then, I sewed the bias tape to the top edge of each pocket.  If you don't already know how to sew bias tape to a raw edge, here's a quick video tutorial I found that shows the process pretty well.  The only difference is that I matched the raw edge of the bias tape to the raw edge of my pocket.

Then, I ironed the whole thing flat, then marked off my 1 inch pleats on the bottom edge of my pockets... (I chose to set them .5 inch from the edge, so the marks were at .5, 1.5, and 2.5 inches from the edge.)  If you start by folding the right sides together at the middle mark (if the pocket is right side up, bring the edges toward the middle) and iron a crease in, it becomes pretty obvious how to match up the other two marks to finish the pleat.  Double check to make sure the finished pocket is 8 inches wide, then iron the living daylights out of the pocket.

At this point, I got lazy.  I hate pinning.  So, I placed the bottom pocket along the edge of my base rectangle with the outside of the pocket facing the BACK side of the base.  Everything should match along the bottom and sides.  I sewed a straight line across the bottom, leaving a 1/2 inch hem.  Then I flipped the whole thing over so the FRONT of the base rectangle was up, made 3 tiny marks along each edge at 4.5 inch intervals starting at the bottom, and sewed the rest of the pocket bottoms to the front.  (You will need to place them upside down, wrong side up- in other words, the bottom raw edge of the pocket facing the TOP of the FE, the outside of the pocket face down so that it lays on/touches the FRONT of your base rectangle.)  OBTW, make sure that bottom pocket is out from under the rest of your FE while sewing the top 3 pockets to the front.  Then I folded all the pockets up along the seams so they were all facing right side out, and ironed them in place.

Now at this point, I noticed I didn't leave enough room at the top to make a pocket for the dowel.  Since I used a 1/2" diameter dowel, I needed to make a 2" pocket to fit around the circumference.  (Yes, technically if you do the math it's 1.55" but I don't sew in precisely straight lines, so I rounded up to 2" to give me some leeway.)  On the red/yellow one, I decide to make loops using bias tape.  I finished the top raw edge of the base rectangle with bias tape first, then ironed the pockets in the correct positions and finished each side of the FE with bias tape, leaving an extra 2.5" tail of bias tape at the top.  Then I folded the tails over and sewed them in place at the top of the base rectangle.  I felt like the FE was drooping in the middle, so on the teal/black one, I took a 3" by 8" leftover from the fat quarter I used to make the pockets, and sewed that to the top.  Then, I ironed all the pockets in place and finished each end with bias tape.  Lastly, I folded the extra black piece at the top, backward, and sewed that in place to make my dowel pocket.

I cut a 9" segment of dowel, drilled two holes (1/2" from either edge), slid it through the loops/dowel pocket, then ran the ribbon through the holes and tied them off.  I made the holes pretty big, so I added some leftover beads to make sure the knots didn't slip through.  You really only need them on the bottom, but I thought it might look better to have one on top of the dowel and one on the bottom of the dowel.

At this point, I decided to take some extra ribbon and hot glued bows to the pockets for the female members of the family... and some Tulip glitter paint to add initials.  A lot of folks use their kids' entire names but I don't like random strangers walking by my door knowing the kids first names... however, if members of the FE exchange prepared kid-specific gifts, then it would help them to know which pocket is for which kid.

Voila.  There you have it.  Once I decided which fabrics I wanted to use, I was able to put these together in about 2-3 hours, from start to finish.  (Including piecing the applique, as well as cutting and drilling the dowel.)  Since I used scraps I already had, all I had to buy was the interfacing, dowel, and paint (roughly $4), but even if you had to buy material, you could still come in under $10, easily.  Much better than paying $45-50+ on Etsy, and hopefully a little more personalized for each character in your family.

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