Last Week at J Stern Designs – August 21, 2019

You  may have noticed that I don’t write much…  This is mostly because I was struggling to come up with another unique topic or project that I could squeeze into my busy schedule.  No time for that… So, I’ve decided to take you behind the scenes… Last Week at J Stern Designs is a recap of all the things I did the week before, sprinkled with details and tips.   I’m hoping this will be an interesting way for me to stay in touch with you.  Let me know what you think!

Last Week at J Stern Designs was inspired by my husband’s trip to Hawaii (to  shoot a wedding).   I wanted to update his work wardrobe …and I had to let out a pair of pants.   I’m feeling pretty clever about letting out the pants.  I’m writing a step-by-step tutorial showing how to do this in the September Newsletter.

After I got Lenny packed and out the door,  I started planning my sofa refurb.   Let me start by saying I HATE home dec projects.   They’re just not my thing.  However, our sofa was looking really sad.  Between Sophie chewing holes in it and patches of fabric that started to show extreme distress, I really couldn’t stand looking at it any more.  A new sofa is not in the budget right now, so I decided to visit my local fabric shop.  Affordable Fabrics has an amazing selection of home dec fabrics.     As luck would have it, there was one roll of fabric that matched the color  of our sofa perfectly.  I’m not sure I want to go through the bother of covering all the surfaces… so matching the cool red color was important.

Here’s what the fabric looks like.  I like to think  of it as “Chanel” inspired Bouclé.  It was a little stiff and scratchy.  But after washing, it softened up nicely. 

I also found a microfiber fabric that looks like suede.  The color was perfect, and I thought it would make really nice piping.

My goal was to finish the entire sofa before Lenny came home.   I know how to make piping, I know how to measure, I know how to sew a straight line, so I was feeling pretty confident.   I decided that I could finish covering all the cushions in two days… Saturday and Sunday.  To give myself a head start, I made 18 yards of piping Friday night.

While I was pre-washing the fabric, I planned out how I was going to make the covers. It didn’t make sense to me to make paper pattern pieces, so I measured across the dimensions and made myself a little blueprint of each piece. 

When I got the fabric out of the dryer, I quickly realized this fabric was going to be really nice to work with.  It had softened up and it was perfectly on grain.  I could use the grid of different colored strands of yarn as a cutting guide.  All I had to do was measure along the edge and cut across – following along the strand closest to the measurement…. Easy!

I started with the chaise lounge cushion.  After adding piping along the exposed edges of the top piece, I cut 8″ wide strips of fabric to create the sides.  My original idea to secure the cover over the original cushion was to make a casing and use roman shade cord to snug it up at the base of the sides. (You can see the cord hanging down on the side of the sofa in the photo above.)    I have a bag of cord stops that I planned on using to keep the roman shade cord snug.  Later in the process, I tried serging elastic to the bottom edges (stretching it as I sewed).  That worked great too. 

All of the cushion covers where pretty straightforward. 

The cushion backs were another story.  They looked like individual cushions… but really it was one piece that was sewn down to create the look of two or three cushions.   I decided to cut individual cover pieces that fit the dimensions of each faux cushion.  I rounded the top corners and added piping to the edges. 

I went around the sides and top of one cushion.  On the neighboring cushion, I added piping to the opposite side and top edges only.  When I sewed the pieces together, it looked like this.

I used a single strip of fabric to create the top edge of the cover.  I sewed along the curved corners and across the seam that connected the individual pieces.   Before adding piping to the back edge of the top piece, I tucked the strip of fabric into the crevasse created by the space between the two cushions, forming a dart of sorts.  The photo below shows the the top of the cushions where the fabric is tucking in.  To secure this shape in place, I sewed the “dart” in from the back edge (right) approximately 1″.   Then I added the piping straight across.

To hold the cover onto the cushion, I added a piece that wraps around to the back. Here’s how they look from the back.

There was a little draping involved. To create the curved shape of the end of the sofa, I pinned the fabric to the cushion and trimmed it to size (including seam allowance)

In the end, it took two extra days, but I managed to finish 20 minutes before my husband came home from his trip. The best part is that because I took the time to pre-wash all the fabric first, I can wash the covers when they get loved up too much by Maggie or Sophie. <3 …Next up in the home dec… New Roman Shades … Happy Dance, I have lots of extra Roman Shade Cord 🙂