The Sofa/Settee

For the sofa, I knew the difficulty would once again be the fabric.  There was no way I was ever going to find this in half scale:

I did try, though.  I kept checking Joann's, and I searched the Internet for tie-dye, stylized sunflowers, floral wreaths, batik and mandalas.  Finally, I found an image with "tribal circles" that I felt was close enough.  The image was black and white, so after tiling it, I played around with the recolor, color tone, saturation, brightness and contrast in Word, and even added a layer of semi-transparent color, trying to get the color I wanted.  My furniture always seems to look lighter in the pictures than it is in real life, but I was pretty happy with the final result on the fabric.  I printed it on a very finely woven white fabric that I had ironed onto freezer paper.

Then, as always for upholstered pieces, I used One Inch Minis tutorials as my starting point for the pattern and construction.  My sofa is really more of a settee than a sofa.  I felt the room was starting to look a bit crowded, and I needed room for the desk chair.

I actually have a few photos of construction this time!

Here you can see the basic structure.    The base is one layer of foam core and one layer of mat board, glued together.  I have added a strip of card stock along the edge, because foam core will look very odd if you try to glue fabric directly to it.  The back is cardboard, and the arms are 3/16" dowels.

Here I've added stacks of narrow strips of foam core between the base and the dowels, then covered the arms with more card stock to smooth everything out.

Base and arms covered in fabric.  The right arm shows how it is supposed to look.  Something went a little wonky on the left-hand side, but once the back rest is on, it will be covered up.

And then I got excited and just finished the whole thing.  The back rest is a layer of card stock with four layers of batting, cut according to Kris's instructions.  The seat is a layer of mat board with two layers of batting, and the back is just card stock covered in fabric.  The legs are my favorite fancy toothpicks.

Now did you really think I made something I was happy with on the very first try?  Of course not!  😊  This was try number one:

Too narrow, seat not deep enough, base too thick, arms too wide, back lumpy (!); it looked out of proportion and just not right.  For this try, I had printed my fabric pattern on silk.  While silk is super easy to work with, I thought the colors came out a little light, and I think that's also what accounted for some of the lumpiness on the back.  What did work incredibly well with the silk were my throw pillows, which were a burgundy paisley printed at the same time I printed my sofa fabric.  They are stuffed with fine sand, and the edges are all glued with Fabric Tack, to hold the sand in.  The combination of the silk and sand made the pillows nice and squishable!

Here is my settee in the room, with the real thing for comparison.

That's it for this week, and as always, thanks for checking out my blog!  I really appreciate the feedback I get.