DIY Couch Cushion Fix

Long time, no talk huh? Life has been crazy especially with cold and flu season upon us. I feel like I’m one more sick kid away from making my children leave the house in hazmat suits with a Purell shower waiting at home. 

Anyways, all those sick kids made it woefully apparently our couch wasn’t equipped for long days watching Netflix. Some background on our furniture. We bought a couch and two accent chairs from a local furniture shop about three years ago. The couch and one chair are the “Best Furniture” brand and the other chair is a “Pallister” This post has nothing to do with the Pallister chair. That thing looks amazing apart from cat induced thread pulling. (Cats are dicks) 

However, the other chair and couch did not fair as well in our home. After about a month of owning them, the cushions looked all sorts of lopsided. I contacted the local furniture shop and apparently the long time owner had decided to retire, and they were in the middle of some ownership changes. Translation: no one had any advice or offered any solutions to the lopsided cushions. I supposed that’s one downside of locally owned (although I feel like it’s really the exception not the rule).

Flash forward one year later, and the couch has pretty much fallen apart. The springs in the main part of the couch fell out completely. At that new development, I call the the local furniture shop, and they offered to come look at it. They had completed the ownership change and seemed to have their act (kinda) together at this point. So, they came over, flipped the couch over to look at the bottom, and the frame literally fell apart in their hands. They picked up the pieces and took the entire thing with them. 

They ended up completely rebuilding the frame and brought me back a like new couch....except for the cushions. Those pesky cushions were now out of warranty. I decided before we bought a completely new couch, it was worth trying some DIY on the cushions especially with a completely new frame and fairly nice upholstery. 

The fabric covers were in pretty good shape. The spring cores were surrounded by a foam cover which also seemed to be in pretty good shape. Once I opened up the foam cover, it was pretty clear why they were so uncomfortable. (And every single cushion was like this!)

So each spring has a "pocket" holding it in place which are attached with one another to create a grid of sorts. However, the material that was used to make these "pockets" is the same fabric as those $1.00 reusable shopping bags. In what world would that fabric decision make any sense? Some brilliant guy was like, "Hey, let's save some money and make this with fabric that is $0.01 per yard. I'm sure that cheap fabric will do great under high tension from springs." (Imagine that I am rolling my eyes high enough to make myself dizzy)

At this point I had a couple of different options I considered. I could completely scrap the cheap fabric and attempt to make my own pockets from a much higher quality fabric (I was thinking some sort of home dec fabric I had sitting around). I didn't love this option because it would mean extra sewing and I wasn't real confident in my ability to make them look uniform. I could just try to mend the current crap fabric, but I knew that would only last so long. After playing around with everything, I decided to do a hybrid approach. 

The first thing I did was get all those tangled springs back into a pocket. I used some upholstery thread (translation...higher strength) to hand sew each pocket in order to keep the spring in place. I stabbed myself with a needle about 200 times, but I got it done. 

After each spring was in the correct place, I took a heavy duty corduroy fabric I had sitting around to wrap the springs. Good thing about them being inside the cushion is the color and design of the fabric doesn't matter. My thought was this fabric will keep the springs in place by not allowing them to pop out the top nor out the side. So, I saved myself from making a completely new fabric structure, but still had the entire spring form wrapped in much higher quality fabric. 

After I had the spring forms fixed, I had to put them back into the cushion foam structure. I quickly found that the fabric and foam had been stretched far enough out of shape that the spring form wasn't enough to fill the space. I grabbed a bunch of batting and shredded foam to refill around the spring form. I put the batting around the spring form so you wouldn't feel the springs and then used the shredded foam around the sides of the spring form to fill out the cushions. 

Over-all the project wasn't too bad. I only had to buy the batting and foam which was around $50.00. I had the thread and fabric already. It took me about one night of three or so hours of work to get one cushion done. I had four cushions total to fix, so in about a week I had the couch in tip top shape. 

DIY Walking Rope

Last spring I was lucky enough to chaperone a preschool field trip. Do you want to know what it's like to chaperone a group of 3 year olds? Go to the humane society and try to get all the kittens in the cat room to line up in a perfect line and wait for instructions.

Yeah. It was interesting. Our preschool teacher is awesome and tries to get the kids outside as much as she can. After my experience with chaperoning, I had a new found respect for the teacher. I wanted to make her walks with the kids just a little bit easier.

You may have seen the walking ropes that daycares, schools or large families use. The idea is if younger children have something to hold on to, they are easier to wrangle.

I decided the concept was something that could easily be made with materials around the house. So, one afternoon I start messing around with the idea. After playing around with some rope and ribbon, I figured it out.

Materials

Ribbon (I used thicker ribbon I had in my scrap bin)
Rope
Sewing Machine (I suppose you could knot the ribbon into loops or try hand stitching or hot gluing..options for those who are sewing machine adverse)
Scissors
Optional: Hot Glue Gun

Step One: Cut Ribbon

You have to decide how many loops you need for your rope. I decided to make 6 loops which allow 12 children to walk on the rope. One big loop will end up being tied off to make two smaller ones. Once you figure out how many loops you want, you need to cut the same amount of strips of ribbon. All the cuts of ribbon should be the same length. Now, my ribbon strips were quite long. I think they were around 24 inches long each.

Step Two: Create Loops

Turning the design to the inside, make the ribbon into a loop (aka circle or whatever fancy word I should be using instead) and sew the two ends together. I did several stitches, because I assume kids are going to be rough on them pulling and such. Do this with all the ribbon strips you have cut.

Step Three: Attach Loops

Once you're done, lay out your rope. I put my loops across the rope so I could see how close they should be together. Then I cut my rope about 2-3 feet longer than how I had it laid out.

To attach the loops, you can't simply tie them to the rope. They would slide all around, and you'd have a 5 child pile up. How I knotted everything is a bit hard to explain (and to show for that matter) but I'll do my best.

You will want to get one ribbon loop fully knotted on before you move on to the next ribbon loop. First, slip the rope through the loop.

Once you have the rope through the loop (or the center of the circle), tie the rope to one side of the ribbon loop. I tied the rope close to the sewn ends just to conceal them, but it shouldn't matter where you tie the rope.

Next, while keeping the rope knot in the center of the ribbon loop, tie the ribbon loop in a knot around the rope. Having the rope knotted this way will ensure it doesn't move around on the rope.

Step Four: Finish

I did a couple of finishing steps on the walking rope. I made a loop on the front of the rope so the teacher can hold it the rope. I wrapped this front loop with ribbon as a bit of padding and then hot glued everything in the place. I also knotted a loop at the very end of the rope for another child to grab. I also secured this knot with some hot glue.

DIY Slip On Converse

Hello!

I don't know if any of you use Photobucket for blogs or forums, but without notice, they decided to just turn off all embeded images. So, my 10 years worth of blog posts now have a bunch of broken signature blocks. Argh. So frustrating. Anyways fellow bloggers, I feel your pain!

This year the Easter Bunny brought my oldest daughter her own pair of Converse high tops. The Easter Bunny got a really good deal on them. However, I, ahem..the Easter Bunny...didn't realize high tops are extremely difficult for kids to get on and off. The laces didn't have any give. Every time she had to take them on and off you practically had to unlace them. My daughter has many pairs of lace shoes that she wears with no problems, but these shoes weren't cooperating.

After a couple of soccer practices trying to get them on, I knew we needed a different solution. I thought about buying those lace free alternatives they now make. The reviews weren't great, and they could be expensive especially if they broke frequently. I was going to rig something up with plain white elastic when I saw a pile of my daughter's elastic ribbon hair ties. Why go with plain white when you can make something unique?

Each set of holes used one hair tie. I didn't have enough to do all matching elastic ribbon, but I did have enough to match the two pairs of shoes. Using a needle and thread, I would thread the ribbon through the hole and sew the front and back of the elastic with white thread. I tried to match the stitching that was already on the Converse. The first side was easier than the second simply because there was a bit of tension as you pulled the elastic ribbon across and threaded it. I left the top two sets of holes empty so it would be easier to pull them on. I am happy to report after a {very} active summer, they are still holding up quite well.