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The sofas looked great at the sale, but in the context of our own stuff, just plain didn't go once we sat them in the living room. Since the room was too cramped for two sofas anyway, we decided to heave one over into the kitchen, where it now serves as a very comfy sort of makeshift bench for the dining table, and, as an added bonus, actually blends right in with the existing décor. The sofa that remained in the living room, however, was more of a problem. The nubbly pinkish-beige fabric was too neutral to fully clash with the gray-red-yellow color scheme, but nobody with eyes would have said it actually looked good.

"Can't you just reupholster it?" the boy asked.

"In theory," I answered.

"Maybe it looks just fine as is," he said, not convincingly.

"Liar," I replied with a sigh.

So I hopped online, dug up every link I could find that might give me a hint as to how to go about covering our new sofa, and set out to get educated. I learned that reupholstering was a far more complicated act than re-covering, involving taking apart the entire piece of furniture, and replacing foam, and all sorts of work that seemed entirely unnecessary given the still-solid construction of my estate sale find. The staple-gun method was a possibility, but given the fact that, true quasi-adults that we are, we'd most likely be eating ninety percent of our meals on this sofa, a removable cover, my ever-so-helpful significant other convinced me, would be much more sensible. This, then, was how I, a girl who once failed to make a supposedly simple dining chair slipcover, came to find myself attempting to slipcover an entire sofa.

It's a good thing that I have such a woefully poor ability to estimate just how long any given home improvement project is going to take. Had I known in advance that the act of giving my sofa some new duds was going to involve three long weeks of working weeknights and weekends, I'd no doubt have abandoned all hope before I'd even gotten started. As it was, it took me a good week-and-a-half -- just about at the point where I'd imagined I'd already be lounging on my newly slipcovered sofa -- before the urge to smash my sewing machine set in. Up to this point, things had progressed swimmingly; I'd bought five yards of gray velvet fabric on sale, cut up most of the pieces I'd be needing, realized I'd need two more yards of fabric, bought some more, and proceeded to pin together the bits of fabric over the sofa in such a way that I'd formed what looked to be a very nicely-tailored slipcover. After gingerly wiggling the cover off the sofa, I sat down at my sewing machine, and proceeded to sew.

keep on moseying

---------------------------> lounge . nourish . host . laze . home.