The cushions on our very used glider rocker needed slipcovers. The fabric that I bought for it (a thrift store tablecloth) turned out to not be quite right for it, but in the box of thrifted fabric that I received for Christmas, mixed in with all the polyester were two new pieces of plaid wool. One in browns and black, one in blue and green and black.
The brown and black piece was just big enough to use for making the slipcovers, but the brown colors were just slightly too frantic for the room, so I decided to try to get some of the blue and green dye from one piece of fabric to the other.
First thing needed is a large stock pot that you are never going to cook food in again; dyes are no good for your health. I had one already. I pre-washed the fabrics in the washer. I filled the stock pot most of the way, put in a small amount of laundry detergent, and the blue-green-black fabric. I bought this to a simmer, and simmered it for a while, stirring it with a dowel from the garage.
Enough dye bled out of it that the water turned almost opaque. I took out the piece of fabric, set it aside in a bucket, and put the other piece in, again simmering it and stirring for a while. (This other piece also had some detergent on it, from a false start that I had made before.) Then I gave each piece (separately) several rinses in clean water, starting with warmer water, and ending with cold.
The brown and black fabric took up very little color in the dye bath, and what it did take up was mostly black, because of the excess detergent, I think, and because the browns mostly cancelled out the blues and greens, color-wise, before being overwhelmed by the blacks, and also the plaid fabrics didn't contain nearly as much dye as some wool fabrics that I have tried this with before. Anyway, the piece came out slightly mellowed, as well as slightly toned down in color. It related much better to the other colors in the room.
The first step in actually sewing the slipcovers was to get the zippers ready. I had two scavenged zippers that were the right length (or longer). One of them needed some seam ripping to free it completely from its original setting.
The next step was to cut a top and a bottom piece of fabric for each cushion, which required some careful layout.
I didn't think I had quite enough fabric to accommodate the zippers, so I decided to set the zippers into strips of a fuzzy black polyester fabric that was also in the box. I consulted a sewing reference book to figure out how to sew in the zippers, but still managed to make a bit of a mess of them. Luckily, the zippers were going at the backs and bottoms of the cushions.
Because of the curved shapes of the cushions, and the plaid stripes that I wanted to carefully match, and the ties that I had to leave openings for, I elected to hand sew, with a whip-stitch, the fabrics around the cushions. I did three sides of each cover, then took it off the cushion, turned it inside out, and machine-stitched outside my handstitching, for reinforcement and to reduce raveling. Then I sewed in one side of each zipper strip.
Each time I did that, I did it upside down/inside out! But I recovered by cutting the strips off the covers (I left extra width in the strips, so that was possible), and resewing them correctly. Then I sewed the other edge and the side edges by hand.
Altogether, the slipcovers make the rocker look retro, but boring, like a saggy old plaid couch. (Plaids really highlight any saggy parts; I should keep that in mind in the future when I'm sewing my own clothes.) It does help to tie some of the other colors in the room together better.
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