Gold Ottoman — Part 2

Here’s part 2 of making the ottoman where I finish it. Sort of. You’ll see.

Here I’ve laid the gold piping fabric out folded on the bias so I can cut bias strips for the piping. This fabric is actually the fabric from my stash. The pretty stuff was bought partly so I could use this stuff and get rid of all my scraps.

Attach the bias pieces together to make one long pice. Here is all the bias fabric attached as one long piece on the left and the cord on the right. 10 yards of it. Enough for two seats!

Now, fold the bias strip over the binding and stitch at the 1/2 inch point.

And a pile of finished piping.

Sew the bias strip to the top and bottom, again stitching at about 1/2 inch seam allowance. We do the top and bottom in case there’s extra on the side. This will allow us to easily take that in without affecting the piping. As it was my measurements were perfect so I stitched up the side to make a loop. I just eased it along the edges and it worked fine. Although the weird selvage did make it a bit of a bother.

When you get to the join, you want to fold over one of the sides of fabric over the edge of the other side. Here’s what it looks like when it’s done:

Now pin the sidewall to the top. Here’s where I just eased it to fit the circle.

When you sew the sidewall to the top and bottom you’ll want to stitch right up against the piping to make it tight. I’d been using a zipper foot. So to get that tightness I moved the needle from the center (as shown on the right above) to the far left (as shown on the left above). This worked very well.

Here’s the finished casing: inside out on the left and right side out on the right.

And now we stuff. The other half of using my stash is to use all those leftover fabric scraps that are too small to do anything with but that I can’t bear to throw away because “they’re still good fabric.” So the real reason to make this was to use all of those as stuffing.

I started by lining the top with batting to give it a nice smooth top. I’d probably line the whole thing with batting next time. But too hard given the size of my zipper (next time I’ll use a much bigger zipper too). So then I took some stuffing I had and put that around the edges to make it soft. And then I started emptying fabric into it. And I mean anything fabric that I would normally throw away (but still clean though). It’s recycling!

From the top left going clockwise: old socks with holes, old pantyhose, old projects, old boxers (which I actually made which is why it was hard to throw them out).

And we’re done! Sorta. You can see it looks a bit deflated. I didn’t have enough scraps to really fill it so this will be an ongoing project. But I am very happy with how it turned out and that I now have somewhere nice to put all my scraps.