Monkeyroom: Completed couch cover

Saturday, November 30, 2019

Completed couch cover

My sewing machine has been occupied with a large task: make the water resistant outdoor covers before the rains come. The fabric ones worked great to keep the furniture clean and protected from the sun, but of course they wouldn't keep the rain off and in fact as the temperature dropped in the evening, we found they were getting damp, so I needed to get cracking on those covers ASAP. I ordered the fabric from Sailrite - 25 yards of it! Thankfully I have a large cutting table.

The left and right pieces of the couch weren't too complicated - just rectangles for the back, front (from cushion to the ground) and over the seat part from the back piece to the front piece. I suppose you could just cut one large piece but the seams you end up with between the three pieces help to position the cover. I measured that the rectangles needed to be 60 inches wide and as luck would have it, that was the width of the fabric (actually the fabric was 59 3/4 inches, but it worked as there was no selvedge). The largest piece needed to be 44 inches x 60 inches and my cutting table is only 36 inches wide, so to make it easier to measure and cut, I moved the roll of fabric to a big dining table we have in the room and put the cutting table next to the table. Then I could just pull the fabric up onto the cutting table for measuring and cutting. Sorry, I don't have a picture, but just imagine the roll of fabric just moved over the edge in the above picture.

In progress - the hardest part is left

I bought matching heavy duty thread from Sailrite as well because it is UV protected, like the fabric (Top Notch 9). I stitched a sample first and had to do a lot of adjusting of the tension. This project was near the limit of what my Pfaff Creative 3.0 could handle. In hindsight I might have done better to dust off my grandma's 1919 treadle sewing machine (wow, it's 100 years old!), but the Pfaff worked ok and has a built in walking foot, which I think helped a lot. Sailrite sells a light industrial machine with a walking foot. Very tempting because I love new tools, but not practical to buy a new sewing machine just for this use.

I managed to get the stitch balanced enough by turning the tension all the way up. I also found you can change the pressure of the presser foot and it helped a lot to increase the pressure to keep the fabric from slipping. Sailrite uses a stitch length of 6 mm in their videos on making outdoor covers - I used 5 mm. They also show reinforcing the seams and keeping the edges from unraveling by stitching a second time through the folded seam allowance or doing a mock flat felled seam. I ended up having to make some narrow seam allowances in places so folding was not an option (note - I used the same dimensions as I did with the muslin covers but found that with the heavier fabric I should have been more generous). I chose instead to zig-zag stitch the seam allowances. This fabric is woven and the edges unraveled easily. I could have bought a hot knife from Sailrite to seal the edges but since I've never used one before I really didn't feel like learning how to use it.

Finished!

The center part was the most difficult - the back is curved and I wanted to match it to get a good fit. I also made a generous hem in case we want to put a cord through the bottom, but the fit is pretty good and I think if the winds are strong enough to lift it, we've got other problems!

I left all the cushions on the couch and there is even another one stuck under the cover too. We just had a very strong rain storm here and I haven't gone out to look to see if the cushions underneath are dry, though the cover seemed to shed the rain pretty well. I'm only concerned about water pooling in the back curve where a seam is and maybe getting through the fabric. But until things dry out, I'm not going to look because if I try to move the wet cover, then I'll surely get things wet.