Such Treasures

I decided to pipe. I was fearful as I took the plunge, but I am so happy I did. God is good to me. I didn’t calculate my piping needs, but just guessed at the home dec store that 30 yards of piping cord would be plenty. Um… it was perfect, with only about 10 inches to spare.

Quickly, here’s how I made the piping. I cut 2 inch strips of fabric that were as long as I needed. I didn’t measure the 2 inches carefully, but rather, just eye balled it. I used strips cut on the grain, instead of bias-cut. Bias-cut strips would go around curves better, but I wanted to conserve fabric. I placed cord in the center of the wrong side of the strip, and brought the raw edges together. Then, using my zipper foot, I stitched close to the cord to create the piping. Rather than pinning, I finger-pinned as I seamed, realigning the raw edges as necessary. Then I trimmed the raw edges down to 1/2 inch.

I was fearful of making the arms and getting the shape right. But I have the old couch fabric pieces to use and they are perfect patterns. Each arm consists of 2 pieces, the piece that curves over the top of the arm and the paisley shaped piece that is the arm’s face. The piping is attached where they are seamed together. I cut one arm apart at this seam. This is what that arm, taken apart, looks like:

The straight edge just above the arm face piece is the edge that used to be curved and seamed on the arm face’s curve. I laid those 2 pieces out on my new fabric and cut out duplicates — 2 of each piece for each arm. Because each arm is a mirror image of the other, I cut one out arm’s pieces with the new fabric facing up and the other set of pieces with the new fabric facing down. I added 1/2? seam allowance just at the edges where I had cut the pieces apart. Before seaming them together, I basted the piping to the right side of the paisley shaped piece with the raw edges together. I referred to the still intact old arm for where to line up the piping. Then I put the right sides together of the two arm pieces and seamed them together, again referring to the intact arm for alignment. I used the zipper foot and butted it up firmly against the piping roll when seaming for a good finish. I was astounded when it actually worked and looked beautiful!

Here the arms are slipped on to the couch, although not yet stapled and smoothed in place. I still have only finished stapling one arm to the frame. I decided to move on to the cushions so we could sit on the couch while I finish the rest of the reupholstery.

Now the cushions. They took me all day Saturday, at least 6 hours. Part of that time was my learning curve. They’re just time intensive — creating all the piping, putting in zippers, measuring, etc. Here’s a close-up of one of the finished cushions.

I took careful measurements of the old cushion covers. Thankfully, I have a book with basic instructions for creating a piped box cushion — Furnish with Fabric by Tricia Guild. I think I could have figured it out myself, but still, it is nice not to have to reinvent the wheel. I needed guidance for how to join the ends of the piping and the book told me how to do that. After cutting out the pieces for both cushion covers — 2 tops, 2 bottoms, 2 gussets (those are the cushion walls), 4 gusset pieces for the zipper, and 4 lengths of piping — the basic steps I followed to create each cushion cover were:

1) Put zipper in gusset pieces. I salvaged the zippers from the old cushion covers. Thankfully, the manufacturer chain-stitched them in place, so they were a breeze to remove by pulling on the right end of the chain.

2) Sew zipper gusset to the rest of the gusset, creating a circle.

3) Baste piping (already created) to the top and bottom of each cushion cover. Again, I had to use the zipper foot. To join, I began basting 1 inch from the beginning and stopped basting 2 inches from the end. Then I unpicked stitches of one end of the piping binding strip, folded it back and inserted the other piping into it (cutting any excess of piping if necessary). Then I folded under the outer layer of piping binding for a clean finish. Then I went back and basted over that to hold the join in place. At corners, I clipped the piping seam allowance so it would make the curve.

4) Still using the zipper foot and butting it up against the piping, I seamed the raw edges, right sides together, of each gusset circle to both a top and bottom. That was the first cushion cover and I repeated this for the other cushion cover. I turned them right side out and put them on the cushions.

I had one problem when doing this — my gusset circles’ circumference ended up too small to make it all the way around the edges of the tops/bottoms. So I unpicked one of the seams (between the main gusset wall and the zipper portion) and added an extension. Because the extension was next to the zipper, it would be at the back of the cushion and wouldn’t show. So no big deal.

That’s as far as I’ve gotten. Now it is Day 5 of this project and I still have to staple one arm down, put the back and side walls up to hide the stapling, and pipe around the bottom. I also may still decide to add a skirt. As for this being a 3 day project, well… I’m behind schedule. But I’m also not exhausting myself, either. I’ve spent about 6 hours each day on this project, excepting Day 4 — Sunday — when I didn’t do any work on it at all.