Despite some setbacks with this seat cushion, I’m pretty happy with this first attempt at a zippered box seat cover. Discovered I don’t have the zipper foot for my sewing machine, planning a jaunt into the quilt store sometime next week to pick one up. A zipper foot makes sewing piping much easier as you can get right up next to the cording without stitching through it or dealing with a wonky presser foot going over different thicknesses, though there are also piping and corded piping presser feet available as well.
some woobles in the piping towards the back where it’s unlikely anyone will see one the chair’s completed
Until I learn how to use the compressor and pneumatic stapler, I can’t do much more on the chair itself, but I can get the other pieces cut and piping made. Here’s a preview, I’m thinking it’s going to look great if I can just persevere.
I’ll smooth out the front later, but I was just so anxious to get a sense of how it’ll look!
Still have the piping to cut and sew, and the inner arm pieces get machine sewn as well, but all of the other pieces are cut now. Waiting for some cotton duck to make the decking though the curved piece (those are darts, like tucks, that change a straight piece into a curved piece) at the bottom of the picture is what connects with the plain fabric to make the chair deck.
The paler piece in the upper right shows the reverse or wrong side of the fabric.
After nearly two weeks in Charlottesville, Virginia, on my last full day there I made the climb up the ridge to Carter Mountain Orchards. I invested in a bushel of peaches. Ignore the side of that top box that says Chiles Peach Orchard. Now a bushel is a lot of peaches, but as there are so many things one can do with peaches (can being an operative word here as the punster strikes again), I set about making sure we’d have reminders of summer and juicy, ripe peaches once I got home.
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The above post was written on August 5, 2019. This was my last trip to Charlottesville to grade these particular professional exams, COVID-19 forced delays of the 2020 exams, and even once they’d been rescheduled, the grading was a virtual event, as was the one just a few weeks ago. Alas, it’s unlikely I’ll be back to lovely Charlottesville, with its surrounding horse farms and vineyards, at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and Carters Orchards, out near Jefferson’s Monticello and Monroe’s Ashlawn Park.
All those peaches, hours and hours of hot labor during some of the hottest days of that summer, but the sweet taste of ripe fruit, gently preserved, still graces my pantry shelves. Since this first canning effort here at Churchill House, there have been apples, apples for pie, apple butter, and lots of pale pink applesauce, lightly sweetened and so refreshing, all put up waiting to be enjoyed. Last summer, we harvested a few gallons of the small wild grapes that grace the property, not an experiment to be repeated any time soon, but still, several pints of ‘crazy wild grape sauce’ accompany the peaches and apples put up in the pantry; a sweet/tart sauce that goes surprising well on turkey or pork.
Within the grape bower, midsummer before they ripen to deep, dusty purple.
I had lots of photos of the process, the piles of stems after the fruit had been stripped, alas, this is all I could find. Tiny, tart, nearly all seed, but what juice and pulp could be garnered made an interesting taste sensation when combined with a sizeable dose of sugar and simmered until thick. Crazy wild grape sauce, a la Churchill House.
After several years of one thing or another, with a pandemic thrown in for good measure, I’m finally getting back to working on the chair I’d stripped while I’d been hunting for the home I’m now living in. So much has happened since I stopped posting regularly, and while I will someday tell the story of why I had to step away from both working on and documenting the progress on the house, it is not this day. This day is about working with pieces of the old upholstery (kept as templates for the new pieces) and some documentation of what I’m seeing so I can replicate it with the new fabric.
I’ve not yet learned how to use the compressor I’d bought to do all the stapling required in upholstery work, so I’m tackling the seat cushion first, no stapling involved. Up until this morning the old cover was in one piece, but now it’s in three: top, bottom, and side. The side includes a zipper, and the cushion was piped, and the construction is a bit different from what one would see in a home decorating book.
First, the piping is part of the side piece, a 6 inch wide strip of fabric that wraps around the entire cushion, connecting the top and bottom pieces. In this instance, it is actually three strips, with one being the insert for the zipper. The zipper itself is about 26 inches (it’s made by attaching a zipper pull to the length of zipper teeth, not premade as one would purchase from a fabric store). It is a center-lap construction, with a length of fabric attached at both ends, one at about 6-8 inches, the other the required length to encircle the cushion.
From what I can tell, the process is attach lapped fabric sides to the zipper, creating the zipper insert, attach zipper insert to both the short piece and the longer piece (with the pull at the shorter fabric end of the insert when closed), and then the piping is added to both edges of the side fabric, with the center measuring 2 1/2 inches between the piping.
Side strip with zipper insert, zipper closed with pull to the left, towards short extension
Entire side piece, short extension, zipper insert, long extension, with piping intact.
The zipper is white, and with the blue fabric planned for this chair, a darker zipper is in order, even though it’s unlikely anyone will see it. There’s also thread to be purchased, and while I have an abundance of piping, it’s all cotton and bigger than the original, so I’m going to have to do some experimenting to see if the larger piping will look good. For now, I’ll make a template from one of the front/back pieces to cut those from the fashion fabric, plus one 6″ and one 58″ piece for the extensions, as well as two 28″ x 3.5″ pieces for the zipper insert. Once these pieces are cut, looks like a trip to the local Joann’s is in order.
Just for reference, here’s the disassembled top and bottom pieces.
As can be seen, the original fabric is quite worn and stained, the left piece being the top.
To make the template, I’ve ironed the right one, to flatten all the seam allowances, folded it in half lengthwise, and will then outline it on some of the lovely packing paper we’ve been collecting since the pandemic forced us to resort to online/mail order much more frequently than we’d normally do.
Patterm template ready to cut…
Top, bottom, side pieces ready for a zipper to be sewn, piping added, then all sewn together.
Tomorrow, masking up and heading to Joann’s, we’ll see if they have everything needed to proceed. For now, a sense of movement!
instructions to the cook 