Peacocks, For Some Reason

The living room is finally *nearly* complete!  I didn't really set out to re-do the entire thing, but that's almost what ended up happening.  So far I've:

• repaired two broken chairs
• new couch from Ikea
• new "coffee table" trunk from an old trunk  I had in storage
• made over an Ikea cart as a rolling side table/art cart
• Recovered a side chair seat
• Added shelves to the tv console for DVD storage
• Stripped, cleaned, and spray painted Sylvan's Tablemate work table (not blogged) 

Over the weekend I use some peacock calico fabric to make 2 new throw pillows and recover a dining chair that I use as a backpack/purse landing pad in the hallway, and a coordinating wall hanging fabric to make a ...wall hanging.  

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1. Wall hanging over the fireplace
2. Hall chair, an Ikea KAUSTBY
3. Throw pillow and Cat of Approval
4. Peacock fabric and teal cotton backing, on a green towel that serves as an ironing board until I get a new one. 

The fabric isn't exactly upholstery quality - it's just a medium weight cotton calico.  So,  I reinforced it with heavy fusible interfacing and backed it with another medium-weight cotton, so it should be fine.  Not bad for like $40 at Fabric.com (including pillow forms and zippers!).  I started out looking for a botanical on a black ground, but I couldn't find one anywhere that I really loved;  meanwhile, this peacock fabric has all the colors I love and want in the room, and gives about the same look as the black botanical I'd had in mind would have. Score!  

I love the way the wall hanging works on the fireplace, and how the peacock pillows kind of bring everything together. The artwork on the fireplace is all pieces painted by me, by Sylvan, and one by her grandmother. 

While I was removing staples from the chair seat, my hand slipped and
I carved a pretty good chunk out of my knuckle on a broken staple. 
Done. For. The. Night. 

What's Next:

IS IT HERE YET?? IS IT HERE YET?? IS IT HERE YET?? 

The Slowest Couch Update EVER

So, sometime around April or May of 2013, I nabbed a sofa off the side of the road, and, looking back over this blog, I realize I never actually TOLD you about it. Oops.  The short version:  it was free, one arm was moldy and gross and I spent about three weeks cleaning, bleaching, and fixing up the fabric on that arm, and it came out great. Stained, but still great.  The couch looks to be an old Ikea piece - I can't find anything like it in the catalogs for the past five years, so it's at least older than that.  It came with two seat cushions, and no back cushions - no cover, either, just the basic under fabric that Ikea furniture comes with.

Fast forward to...yesterday.  Tired of both sitting on the floppy, thin cushions this sofa came with, and of that damned Day Sofa from World Market (I never like anything I do with it, and every time I decide to fix it up I get bored with it before I'm even finished, anymore. It's in the garage now), I took the loooong seat cushion that I made for it in 2012 apart, and used them to build and bulk up the white sofa's seat cushions.

Creating a long cushion for the convertible Day Sofa. 

All four of these pieces were made by slicing a pair of very thick salvaged seat cushions in half horizontally.

For the white sofa, I sliced the two larger seat pieces in half horizontally again, angling them to make a wide wedge, to build up the white sofa's cushions all over, but with the thickest part at the back to help reduce the steeply pitched angle of the sofa seat (I couldn't get up!)

Trying out pieces and shaping. 

A pic of the dry-run, with the wedges, a bit of rolled-up batting at the front edge to soften the transition between pieces, and a thin layer of batting (later doubled) wrapped around the whole thing to smooth out the seams between pieces.

After I was sure of the result, I used spray-adhesive to stick all the parts together and smoothed out all the edges.

Then I used an old cotton sheet to make a cover for each cushion, to hold it all in place.

Yes, I fixed the wrinkliness of the one on the right. It was just on weird. 

Now THAT'S what I call seat cushions.  They're about 2" thicker than the old cushions, smooth, soft, and squishy.  They look a bit slapdash in the pic, here, but keep in mind, this whole sofa is meant to be used with a slipcover, and the seat cushions are the same way.  This thing is so comfy with the deeper, softer cushions, that when I lay on it to chill later in the evening, I fell asleep right away and woke up covered with cats.

The next step will be to create back cushions out of the remaining two pieces from the Day Sofa in the top picture. After I'm satisfied with those, I'll be on the hunt for some fabric to cover this entire piece of furniture.  I can't wait!  This thing has needed a lot of work, but I adore the shape of it, and I'm really excited about getting it covered.  :)


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Meanwhile, In Living Room Land

This week, I have lots to do in the living room.  I'm finally making that day sofa cover, and I'll get to talking about this "new" couch I've alluded to in the past few weeks.  I'm also juuuuust about ready to start re-arranging the entire thing.  You heard me. The entire. Thing.  You'll see.

In the meantime, some inspiration pictures, which also serve as hints:

via Pinterest

Decorology

Pinterest

Apartment Therapy

Resurrection of the Day Sofa

I didn't waste any time putting my World Market sofa back together when that hardware came in the mail.  It  took longer to bring the frame pieces in from the garage than it took to put the arms onto the base.  The back, though, not so much.  Turns out they've tweaked the design of this thing just a tad since I bought mine, and the bolts for the back didn't fit quite right.  They'll be easily replaced at Home Depot on the way home from work later this week, though.

The next step was to create a cushion for the thing (see previous post).

Enter  (1) two salvaged couch seat cushions and (2) an electric turkey knife.  No, I'm not kidding.  A serrated blade cuts foam really well, but a hand-held one leaves little bits and chunks.  Two fast,  reciprocating, serrated blades cut through this stuff like buttah.

cat-approved

Once both cushions were split into four, I cut two of them down to fit the arms of the couch (a little longer, actually, so that the entire finished cushion would be long enough when the couch was laid out flat):

notice the Jiffy Pop Method of  cat deterrent for plants in the background. 

Next step is the cover.  That's going to be made from a cotton upholstery twill that was, actually, once another couch cover - the cover for the seat of the couch, actually, which I had first made into a cushion for this sofa, LOL.  The fabric is in great shape, though it's a tad discolored, as old as it is (and as many dogs as have sat on this couch.  It took a long time to train them to stay off the furniture when no one was looking!)  The inside, however, is still nice and fresh-looking.

The basic idea is a variation of this:

source

The seat cover I'm using is already mostly sewn.  I just have to trim the seams and flip it inside out, shorten it a bit, and throw a zipper into one side.

More on that when it's done. :)


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Folding Sofa, Lightly Used, Needs New Cushions

You know what else I want in the living room?  This:

This is World Market's "Studio Day Sofa" (actually a photo of the slipcover they sell for it in "Mallard", which I guess is a color now, and not a duck.  Looks teal to me).

I have one, actually - or rather, I have the frame.  Long ago, back when I was newly divorced and possessed of a house with no furniture in it, I picked one of these up as a floor-model markdown for cheap.  While it was fantastic for one person to sit on, it didn't make even adequate main seating.  More than one person could sit on it if it was folded out (both arms lay down flat), but if one person got up, the other person was dumped onto the floor as the whole thing seesaw'd up into the air on the vacant end, since the feet are so close to the middle when folded out.  Whoops.

That said, I think it would make a fantastic auxiliary piece for extra seating, or for an out-of-the-way little reading nook type of thing.  It would be a great replacement for that dumb little Ikea mini-couch thing I picked up for free intending to spruce up but never did.  It's smallish (62"x33"), low enough to feel divan-esque (only 25" high at the back), and awesomely versatile.

The problem is that the cushion that came with this thing was thin enough that I could feel the wooden frame through it. I replaced it with a thicker, firmer cushion that I made from an old couch cushion, but when I retired the sofa to the garage for storage, I got rid of the cushion I'd made (one of my dogs had been sleeping on it while I was at work, and it was, erm, a bit funky).

Once I've got a new seat cushion for it (Ikea has a thin mattress I think I can work with, for only about sixty dollars), and some nifty throw pillows, I plan to put this thing into action again in place of the mini-couch.

Also World Market.  Also in "Mallard."  I have several of
these in different colors, including this one.  Looks teal to me.  

right?  

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