Day 16 - Making a new cushion

The chair I reupholstered yesterday was missing a back cushion, surprisingly the slip took such little time I actually made this yesterday too. I used an old lumpy cushion from the sofa downstairs (which is similarly gross and is begging for the same treatment.) which I stuffed into an old pillow case and stitched shut to stop all the feathers escaping and try and give it some new shape. This done I then lay out pieces for my outer slip, (this one is removable for washing again.) I used a whole piece for the back and made the front up out of three rectangles (mostly because my leftover fabric was just a little bit too small.) I wanted to incorporate this patch, which had once lived proudly on one of The Man's t-shirts but had accidentally ended up in my scrap fabric bag, and, well...used for scrap. As you can imagine, this upset him a bit so I've kept hold of it for about two years with the intention of doing something with it! Well, today is the day. As the surface of the patch is printed it's a bit tacky and my machine was having difficulty feeding it through, so I made a small fabric frame to sandwich it, and actually the result is better than I could have hoped for. 

There are no zips or buttons on this pillow, the back has a longer section which tucks in and keeps the cushion in nice and firmly. 

There it is then, about 3 hours work, no ironing, no zips or buttons, no great skill just a bit of determination. (It's so much easier making clothes for something that doesn't breath, move or have annoying protruding parts!) 

Day 15 - DIY re-upholstery

Before

For the Man's birthday tomorrow and as another step towards completing the look of our room I took the challenge of transforming his lumpy, unsightly downright nasty chair into something a little more sophisticated. This is what I started with...

I decided that I would make a washable slip, rather than pull the existing fabric off and tack new stuff on. I lay the fabric over the chair to cut, (I am not one for pattern making and this way was pretty simple.) The seat, front and back are all made from a single piece with separate rectangles for the seat sides and two more shapes for the back sides. Then came lots of sewing, a little bit of unpicking and some head scratching, et voila!
It just slips over, holds the cushion nicely in place and looks sooo much better. Tomorrows blog will be along later today, and will complete this cosy chair.

After