Cushion Rejuvenation Session 2: Types of Outdoor Fabric

When you are going to tackle a cushion cover project, there are several different types of fabric that you can use. Now, if you're going to be doing an outdoor cushion, my recommendation would be to use a UV coded fabric or one that's made with UV thread. You can usually find these at your local fabric stores if they carry upholstery weight fabric. You can also find them at like a interior design center, and you can have them special ordered, or you can just get it off the website, there's a very popular one called Sunbrella, and that holds up really, really nicely in the sun. And that'll last you several seasons, especially if you put them away during the winter. Now if you're doing an indoor project, you can kind of use whatever you want. My recommendation would still be to use some sort of printed canvas, especially if this cushion is going to be sat on or if the throw pillow is going to be leaned on. You want something with a little more substance. So, this fabric right here is just a simple printed canvas duck cloth, and these are very inexpensive and they're beautiful, and I've actually used this same stuff to make several different covers for my dog's bed because he loves to chew right through the cover. So this is even good for projects like that. So anything that you want to do indoors is fine. If you're gonna use a quilting weight cotton, because they come in the best prints, make sure that you put something on the back side of it like a fusible interfacing or back it with some plain colored canvas, that way it will give it some shape and some oomph because that fabric is so thin. So, now that we've picked our project and we've picked the fabric that we want, we have a lot of math to do, so I'll see you in the math section. All right, we need to find out how much fabric we need for this particular cushion, and also, we need to get the measurements so that we know exactly how to put this together. So I have a little worksheet that I've worked up for you, you've got it in PDF format, so please make sure to download that, and you can fill this in as you're measuring your cushion. We are going to measure the width and the height and the length. I'll bring my cushion in here. Let's measure the length first. So I'm gonna start over here, and it's a little puffy, so I'm just gonna go - it looks like this is about 22 and a half inches, so I'm gonna write that in on the length. Now, I'm gonna swivel it this way and we're gonna get the width of the cushion. Now it's kinda rounded right here on the side, so I'm just gonna kind of hold it out like this. It looks like this is about 16 inches. So, I'm gonna write that in for my width. Now, I have to measure the depth of the fabric, or in this case it's the height 'cause if this is sitting here, this would be the height. So I'm gonna turn this this way. And it looks to me like this is about three and a half inches right there, all right, so I've got that measurement. So I'm gonna put that down. Okay, so, I have a little formula here for you so that you don't have to do any thinking, you do have to do the addition though. So, we're gonna start with X, the number is 16 here. Y is 3.5, okay. So if we add these all together, 16, 17, 18, we have 19 and a half plus our one inch of seam allowance, that gives us 20.5 is A, so I can write that in down here, 20.5. All right, now we're gonna take our cushion length, which is 22.5 plus Y, which is 3.5, plus one, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, so we've got 27. So now I can write 27 right there. So, this is the size of the panel that you need to cut for the top, but you also have to cut two of them because you need one for the bottom. So, although this cushion here has one full piece and it has two sides, we're gonna do our cushion cover a little bit different. We want to have our seam right on the side here, that way we can insert a zipper, and we're gonna omit the piping because that's a lot of work, and if you're just gonna recover them again with something different then there's no need for all of that decor. So, we know now that we need these two sized pieces. So you are now able to determine how much yardage you are going to need for this cushion, because you know you need two pieces, okay? So, if you need to draw it out, if you know the fabric is 44 inches wide, then you might have to get a little bit more. If you know it's 60 wide, you might be able to fit both of those squares on top of each other, and then you only need, you know, maybe a half a yard for this particular thing, or three-quarters of a yard instead of two yards, it all depends on the width of your fabric. So, make sure you take these numbers with you to the fabric store when you are shopping for your fabric. So, now that we have our fabric, we have our measurements, it's time to cut our pieces. Now because these pieces are a little large, it's hard to get things just square. So in the next topic, we're gonna talk about how to cut your pieces and get perfect right angles.