Are you sitting comfortably?
Upholstery - and why you should give it a go
In the gap between New Year’s Eve and the kids’ return to school, I decided to re-cover our old sofa. It’s an obscenely comfortable Loaf “Crumpet” make, which I’d bought for a song, second-hand on eBay back in 2016. (Those were the days when it was possible to buy a second-hand Loaf sofa cheaply. Now, they seem to go for a near-new price.) It was already quite stained when I first got it, and I’d always intended to re-cover it but decided to wait until the children were a little bit older. ‘We can’t have pretty things yet,’ I remember saying to my husband in 2016. ‘There’s no point. The girls [who were then aged 4 and 2] will just smear yoghurt over it.’
Well, nearly 10 years down the line, the sofa was even more stained with yoghurt (and chewing gum, raisins, hot chocolate, cereal and milk *boak*), and there were sadly no imminent signs of my children becoming more hygienic. I was tired of feeling like I was risking salmonella every time I sat on the existing couch, so I decided that, fuck it, I was just going to make it pretty anyway (and probably ban the girls from ever sitting on it). Years ago, I had bought (again, from eBay) a large roll of factory seconds upholstery fabric in a gorgeous darksky-blue William Morris ‘Seaweed’ print, which I’d intended to make into curtains but never got round to doing, and it occurred to me that that fabric would look stunning as a new sofa cover. (Stupidly, however, I didn’t think about how difficult it would be to match up the fabric pattern, when I needed to sew two pieces together.)