Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Yellow Dove Sofa Cover


Time flies. It's November and I've not been sewing much. Well, the reason was we have shifted house and did a lot of packings, unpacking, throwing away unused items and cleaning, fixing, etc etc in the whole month of October.

I can't believe we have 53 cartons of items! That exclude the plastic toyogo boxes of clothes, breakable items, potted plants, sewing machines etc. Thank God we had planned well and the move was executed smoothly. I'm blessed and so touched that my parents came over to help us with the move.

Anyway, the only thing I've sewn in October was a new sofa cover. There is this sofa set that my mother in law gave us. The original cover were quite coarse against the skin and I didn't like the dark color.  So, I had this insane idea to sew a new cover myself. Yah, what was I thinking. Here was I  cutting up the fabric in the midst of packing with carton boxes piling all around me. But I just can't bear to hold the sewing till the move.


Anyway, I didn't get to finish them before the move. Only managed to finish the 3 bottom seat cushion covers since they are basic rectangles. The fabric is a mustard yellow corduroy that I got from Spotlight.  For the measurement I took the original cover and measure off them to get the estimates.

The top of the sofa was a bit of challenge since it is not a strict rectangle but more of the slope on the front.  So I trace out the existing one and make a template. The only paper template that I made.  You can see my template below if you are interested to try this. I've use the space inside the template to note down all the measurements for the 3 sofa covers.  So I only need to keep this template that also contain the measurement instruction! The sofa set consist of 2 smaller ones and 1 big one so you will see 2 measurements.

click to see.

Did you notice that the Dove print for the 2 smaller sofa set below actually match across? I'm so pleased with this. This is due to the precise cutting layout you see below.  The twill fabric with yellow dove print is also from Spotlight. From afar, my girl commented that it looks like yellow spectacles. Oh well. I fell in love with the cheery color and print but you know what, the grain was off for this print! If you intend to buy this same fabric, just be careful. Since I'm more concerned that the print down look off align, I just ignore the fabric grain and just cut along the print so that it will still looks straight.  I also use bigger seam allowance so that it will cover the off grain print.



The cutting layout draft for the Dove print. I label each piece by A, B, C, D so it's easier to plan and draw. Basically this will help me to visualize the amount of fabric that I need. It's important to draw this especially if you have directional print. Since my fabric is off grain, in the end I needed more so back to the store the next day!



Here's my girl enjoying herself on the new sofa cover. Please ignore the steel shelvings below. There are still some unpacking to do so I taking a break to sew here. Hopefully I can hit the sewing room for some clothes sewing soon.


1 comment:

Nueyer said...

That's an amazing job!! I'd never be able to get the print to align like yours did. The closest I've ever got to re-upholstering was for an old fake leather chair that started to peel =p