Embroidered Couch Cusions — Leah's Sewing Room

Jul 22

Jul 22 Enhancing our Couch with Embroidered Cushions

Since buying a new couch, I have wanted to make some new cushions for it. Our old ones were very sun faded, and looked pretty sad on our new couch. In essence, I wanted to transform our main living space, and the couch cushions were the final step.

The top half of the cushion is the sun faded outside, compared to the bottom half, which is the inside.

Inspiration

I initially wanted to do something very tropical, but I wasn’t finding designs that I liked, as I also wanted something quite sophisticated.

I found this Urban Threads design, called Fern Fronds, and thought it would work well, but wasn’t 100% sure it was what I wanted. When we moved into our new house, which backs onto bush and a creek, I knew it was perfect! There are fern palms out the back of our house, so it’s a way of bringing the outdoors in. Additionally, the design pairs well with our bookcase that we made last year. The bookcase is backed with a Jocelyn Proust fabric from Spotlight that has rainbow lorikeets and bottlebrush trees on it.

Construction

I used the previous cushions as a guide for my new cushions. One significant change I made was adding a zipper to the cushions, as I found the envelope style cushions resulted in the pillows often trying to escape their covers.

The cushions are square, so I made the front 17.5 inches wide X 17.5 inches tall. The back was cut into two pieces for the invisible zippers. The bottom piece of the back was 13.5 inches tall X 17.5 inches wide. The top piece of the back was 5 cm tall X 17.5 inches wide. I provided for an extra one inch total in the height to account for the seam allowances for the zipper, i.e. half an inch of seam allowance for the zipper per piece.

I embroidered the fronts of the pillow using a my Pfaff Creative 3.0 sewing & embroidery machine. I used the largest hoop (260 X 200mm), and used tearaway stabilizer underneath the fabric. I used gutermann sulky rayon thread in #1051, and the fabric is a dark blue-turquoise cotton from Ikea. Initially, I used white bobbin thread, but quickly changed to black bobbin thread. Even with adjusting the tension, I found the white was occasionally peaking through, where as the black didn’t show up on the dark blue-turquoise fabric.

Once I finished embroidering, I constructed the pillow backs. First, I sewed some small pieces of fabric to the zipper tape ends, so that the zipper tape ends wouldn’t be visible, providing a cleaner finish. I just cut scraps to size, folded the ends underneath, and made sure that the zipper tape, including the fabric ends, was at least 17.5 inches wide. Then, I installed the zippers using my invisible zipper foot. I found this project was a great way to practice my invisible zipper installation skills, and was a good way to build confidence for future garment sewing projects. After that, I serged the front and the back together, and that was it! Too easy!

Serging complete: just need to turn it right side round.

Styling & Final Thoughts

The pillowcases turned out great, and look lovely on the couch. They also blend well with our living room furnishings, and I like how the embroidery adds a subtle amount of texture to the couch, along with the knitted throw. Overall, I achieved the inviting and cozy, yet still sophisticated, living room I was after.