The body of the tufted sofa is finally finished!  This has definitely been the most challenging upholstery project I’ve taken on, but it’s shaping up nicely and now it’s all smooth sailing with the cushions.  (I feel like I need to knock on some wood or something now!) Here’s a peek at how the body turned out… Did you notice anything? Well, if you’re very observant, you may have noticed that there are two different trims.  Hopefully, you didn’t and my plan worked! You see, I had this beautiful jute trim… ..but I only had two spools of it and I couldn’t find more that was exactly like it.  I really wanted to use it, but I was about six feet short of having enough for the entire sofa.  I decided to use the trim, anyway, and figure out how to make up that extra six feet.  That stretch would be

Remember when we were all collectively wooed by burlap?  It’s cheap.  It’s neutral.  It brings lots of texture to the space.  And, did I mention that it’s cheap? So, burlap was everywhere.  EVERYWHERE.  Curtains, wreaths, dust ruffles, pillows, upholstery, table linens…  burlap wasn’t off limits for anything home decor.  It still isn’t, really.  If you run a search for burlap on Pinterest, the ideas are ample. I must admit that my curiosity was piqued, but I could never bring myself to fully hop on the bandwagon.  I put my toe in with some burlap ribbon and a cousin to burlap, upholstery webbing, but that’s about as far as I would go. I may have been a bit unfair to burlap, because all burlaps are not equal, but my mind was already fixed. Before I started working on the tufted sofa, I had a vision for it.  Hemp sheets on the front, so

Remember my struggles with the tufted sofa?  I’m not usually paranoid about inanimate objects, but I felt like I needed to keep an eye on that one.  It silently threatened to “do me in” with its seemingly bulletproof batting and ridiculous amount of tufts. I finally learned how to speak a language this sofa would understand… Let’s just say that the sofa got the point.  It understood the awl perfectly.  (Jeff thinks I should’ve said it understood “awl-fully well”, but I just couldn’t go that far.) The wooden handle of the awl and the sharper, thicker needle allowed me to push through all of the layers and make a way for the thinner upholstery needle.  (For those who asked about the needle, I was using a needle made for tufting, so it was relatively thick, sharp and six inches long, but it wasn’t enough to get through this sofa.) So, I

I don’t know about you, but I always start projects with great optimism and enthusiasm.  And most of the time things go smoothly. This is not one of those times. Stripping the upholstery was pretty easy, because three of us worked on it in turns… And painting the frame?  No problem. I added a layer of batting to the back, so it would soften the foam a bit…   And I used the pieces of fabric that were removed from the sofa as templates for the new fabric pieces. That back piece was huge!  I happened to have an antique hemp mattress cover (that would’ve been stuffed with hay or feathers, depending on how affluent the owners were) that was long enough once opened up. We pinned all of the pieces in place and cut them out.  I cut the back piece much larger than the fabric template, because of the tufting,

I have a lot of “business-y” things on my to-do list for the month, so it’s important that I balance it out with creative work…projects that are fun for me to work on, take pictures of, and share here on the blog.  I’m trying to resist the urge to buy new things and, instead, work on pieces that have been hanging out in the studio for a while, waiting for a makeover. So, Kriste, Katie (I’ll tell you about her in a minute) and I have been picking away at the sofa for a couple of days, stripping off the circa 1980’s blue and mauve fabric that is reminiscent of fabric you’d find on dentist office chairs. It looked okay at a quick glance, but it was stained and the cushion fabric is worn in several places.  It’s a fantastic Belgian-made sofa with a sturdy frame and good guts, so