One of the “nice to have” projects on our list when we bought Elara was to replace the Salon cushions. The V-berth cushions were actually in pretty good shape, but the Salon cushions had seen better days. The foam was worn and crumbly, and the fabric had rust stains from the tufting buttons… After getting some quotes to have them done professionally (and having mild heart attacks at the cost) we decided to tackle the job ourselves. After watching the Sailrite video on sewing cushions about 100 times, I felt confident enough to give it a go.
The first step was planning out how much material we would need. In order to do this, I recorded the largest dimensions of each cushion, taking into account the zipper plaque and side boxing. I then went into a vector graphics program (Affinity designer for the curious) and created a document 54 pixels wide.
why? because the fabric we’d be using was 54″, thus I could use 1″ = 1px to lay out my patterns.
I then began drawing boxes according to my measurements – separately for each top panel, and each boxing piece. This way I could move them around to find the optimal layout for the least amount of wasted fabric. Ultraleather is *not* cheap! Once I finished laying out all the panels, I was able to calculate the length of fabric needed. Came out to just under 10 yards. I ordered 12, as I’m sure we’ll mess up at the beginning :-)
