Category Archives: sewing

yesterday I took about 11 1/2 hours and reupholstered my couch. to be fair, it really took about 10 hours – there was some time spent on the phone with kathleen, or eating lunch, or lying on the floor and staring at the ceiling. but it was worth the pin sticks and the long toil, because here it is: my beautiful, reupholstered couch!

it took so very very long because the fabric that I bought was only 54″ wide, and my couch is, obviously, much longer than that. so I split the fabric and sewed it onto the ends of another piece to avoid a seam down the middle, and that was horrible excrutiating work, but it came out awfully nice.

the process was a bear because it involved a lot of draping and pinning and sewing and fitting and pinning and sewing and fitting. lots of back-and-forth between the couch and the sewing machine. I fitted everything together like this:

and sewed on the arms and then the fronts of the arms very last. I listened to the 3rd amelia peabody book downloaded from the library and boy howdy am I glad it’s done! I won’t make any brash assertions that I won’t do this again ever (like I did with the denim couch) but I won’t do it again for a good long time, that’s for sure.

here’s another couch mock-up. heck! it’s so hard to pick a strategery!

this weekend I have a number of engagements, but the most long-standing is my date with reupholstering my couch. I reupholstered our couch in spanish harlem – michelle and I got to work with a bunch of denim and a staple gun and my sewing machine and made our tweedy couch into a thing of sleek beauty. it was horrible. it took FOREVER (like, more than 1 evening) and was a big old pain in the keyster, but it was so beautiful when I was done.

the couch I’m using now is a hand-me-down from my stepfamily – maggie bought it new in the 90s, which explains the hunter green navajo print, and then sarah used it for a while, and then it sat on her (enclosed) front porch for a while. As I have a no-moving-the-couch policy currently (it’s WAY easier to ditch the couch when you move), I am not ready to commit to purchasing a new one for hundreds of dollars. and even though I swore up and down I would never reupholster a couch again, in the interests of re-using a couch (aka keeping it off the street) and not turning 30 with a couch covered in sheets (v. collegate), I will cover this old used couch that I have.

I was going to cover it with this fabric:

but now I’m not sure. it’s beautiful fabric, but it’s awfully busy. it won’t match my orange tweed recliner. and it stresses me out to worry about matching patterns so neatly when I sew the whole thing together. Sat. I’m going to stop by the Fabric Warehouse in bellville to see what they’ve got, and hopefully there will be lots of some cheap, light colored (non blue) decorators fabric with which I can reupholster my couch. Currently the couch is wrapped in some lavender sheets and that is pretty great. I would also like white, but as I enjoy eating chocolate on the couch it might not be the best idea. Ideally I want to get something that will match my beautiful dream fabric so I can cover old pillows in it. (I plan to reuse old smooshed bedroom pillows as the pillow bases. this is one of the reasons I categorized this post under buy vs. make.)

EDIT: after talking to a coworker who has her first degree in interior design, she suggested the busy busy fabric for the body of the couch and black for the cushions. and if that’s too busy adding additional throw pillows on the couch with black or white fabric. HMM. she is totally talking me back into it!

anyway, here is the dorkitude: tuesday night I went home and made these sketches (on graph paper liberated from a prior employer) of my couch to estimate how much fabric I needed. I’m so glad I did it because now I know what I’m in store for. but, yeah. Very Dorky.