Monthly Archives: May 2010

My primary sewing interest is in fashion… obviously as this blog has leant heavily in that direction!!  However I shouldn’t lose sight of my initial purpose of this blog, which was to document all of my sewing efforts over the years.  And I have sewn up my fair share of mundane practicals like home wares in my time too.  One of my regular jobs is to recover our lounge suite.  We bought this lounge suite new from Freedom back about eighteen years ago, and it’s been such a goodie.  It’s been solid and sturdy enough to cope with three babies, grown into toddlers, grown into children, grown into teenagers and all their friends, as well as our four pets.  
One of its biggest pluses has proved to be its simple square shape which has leant itself very well to easy recovering, so that even a rank amateur such as myself has had no trouble in fashioning a new cover with my little old sewing machine…
The original cover of this suite (which is still there underneath, its only fault is that the colour has faded in patches) is navy blue canvas.  The cover in these photos is the third re-cover I have made for it; it has previously had a pale blue/grey corduroy cover and subsequently a chocolate brown chenille-y type of fabric cover before this one (I should hunt for some photos of these).  This mustard-y, moss-green chenille cover has been on the suite for about two or three years now and you can see it’s wearing a bit thin on the corners of some of the chair cushions.  What you can’t see in these photos is that one of the back corners has been used as a scratch post by one of our darling (said with gritted teeth) little pussy cats, so is becoming a mite shredded at the back.  So I’m thinking it may be time to source some new upholstery fabric and make up a new one soon.
Although recovering one’s lounge suite may seem like a daunting task, when you have a nice simple square shaped suite like this one it’s actually very easy.  I kept parts of the first re-cover I made so now I have a pattern to work from each time I have to do it.  It’s a simple matter of measuring, cutting out the pieces and sewing them together, just like any sewing project… absolutely no difference.  The only difficulty factor is the sheer size of fabric pieces you are working with, so I usually haul the sewing machine over to our dining room table to make use of the larger working space when I’m tackling this sort of thing… When the cover is sewn up, they are just slipped over the lounge suite and I flip it upside down and either staple it or tack it to the wooden frame underneath.
This suite has a two seater and a three seater, and I find it takes 19m of upholstery width fabric, that’s without having to match any patterns.