Lounge suite re-cover, version 1

My post last week entitled “Lounge suite re-cover” should really have been given the addendum “version 3”, as it is the third re-cover this suite has endured…  
After searching high and low for a photo of the first re-cover this is unfortunately the best I can come up with.  Rats.  I’ve not been particularly good in the past with photographing the stuff I’ve made, but I’m trying to do better in this respect… after all I set up this blog as a kind of record of all my sewing efforts both past and present and it’s been so frustrating that some of my favourite projects have gone and I have no pictorial record of them anymore…
This first cover (made in 2000) was made in light blue/grey corduroy that was on super special from Textile Traders.  Naively reassuring myself I was “of course!, capable of whipping up a new cover for our lounge suite…!”  I blithely bought twenty metres and faced my first struggle when I had to somehow get this huge bolt of fabric into my car to get it home…  Eventually worked out how to put down a few seats (my husband had always done that for me), opened the flap into the boot that I didn’t know was there before and discovered it with some relief in the carpark that day…  Finally manhandled the roll of fabric in the car and drove home with it half in the boot, half poking between the front car seats and resting on the dash beside me, my youngest son wedged firmly between the fabric and the car door in the back seat.  A Laurel and Hardy moment in our lives…
This was a huge project for me, being the first time I had tackled something as big as this.  I spent days struggling with large swathes of corduroy, pinning and measuring, refusing to admit defeat.  I was one immensely proud seamstress when it all came together at the end.  I was like, sure I can make clothes for myself, but now upholstery…! Now I’m gettin’ somewhere!, achieving a whole new level of competence here.  So this project marked a minor watershed in my sewing life…so to speak.
It was a tough and hardy cover but in retrospect the colour was deeply impractical…. when you have three children that will eat their Vegemite-on-toast on the couch in front of the TV whilst your back is turned; when chocolate treats are passed around in front of a late night movie… yeah, you get the picture.  The pay-off is a couch that is a sheer embarrassment if friends come around to visit; not to mention the mother-in-law…  (only joking, my mother-in-law is very understanding about furniture that suffers the onslaught of children and animals on a daily basis, lucky for me!)
(sheepish explanation for the huge mess in photo 2, my excuse is that it was Christmas Day, post present opening…)