My Sew Perfect Day Sew Far

Like a lot of things, this begins with a back story so bear with me.  About 2 months ago, my husband and I bought two La-Z-Boy recliners to replace the two derelict ones we had in our family room. (By the way, never look at your discarded furniture when it is outside in the sunlight waiting to be picked up.  However bad it looked inside, trust me, it looks ten times worse in the light of day.)

But I digress.  The new chairs arrived ahead of schedule but when they did arrive, I noticed that the fabric squares usually provided for the protection of the back and arms of the chair did not arrive.  So I called my friendly showroom only to be told that the reason they didn’t arrive is that they are no longer included.  For a ‘nominal’ fee – and I don’t know what your idea of nominal is but around eighty bucks a chair doesn’t qualify in my book – they could be sent to me.  And I should mention that this princely sum buys three 16”x16” square pieces of fabric.   I asked if I could just buy a yard of the material and was happy to find out that I could and at a fraction of the cost so I ordered a yard.

Fast forward to Saturday when a package arrived containing my fabric.  Here is where, as the British say, things began to go pear-shaped.  I took the fabric to my sewing room and tried to find a matching spool of thread.  It turns out I have thread for almost every other conceivable sewing project.  But not this one.  Not this particular shade of blueish, greyish, greenish.  This is apparently a HIGHLY popular color in La-Z-Boy circles, but not at my house.

Fast forward again to today when I decided to visit my local quilt shop.  I located the thread, bought a couple of spools and got back in my car.  Fortunately, I remembered that I also needed the little screw pins to hold the squares against the back of the chairs (more about those later) so I backed right back into my parking space and went back into the store.

Upon arriving back at home, I unpacked the serger (trims and sews a clean finished edge on fabric), and began to change the thread color.  My mother-in-law whose serger this is taught me a handy trick for changing thread.  Instead of pulling the old color out, just cut the old and tie the new on.  Yah.  Not so much.  Picture one of those corn mazes shrunk down to the size of a slice of bread.  Only without the neat little “I give up” flag you get to raise in the air if you get lost.  Now picture four of them.  Yup, so four strands of thread that weave mysteriously around little color-coded bits of metal.  And the instructions are written for people with more than two hands - a lot of "swing presser foot out while turning wheel while threading . . ." Whoa.  That's three hands right there and they weren't finished yet.  Every time you get one threaded and go onto the next, you manage to yank the first one out of place.  Hooray!  This is FUN!  So 2 hours pass and I’m not going to lie to you – bad words were said.  Out loud.

Now it’s time to take the serged squares fold and sew the edges.  I haven’t used the sewing machine in a while and apparently all of the little holes in the bobbins have shrunk in size by at least 50%.  Or at least that’s what it feels like when I try to thread one of them.  Amazingly, the sewing part was pretty uneventful.  Now time to fasten them to the chairs.

I don’t know if you have ever seen one of these gizmos they call screw pins.  Picture a small plastic button on top of a wickedly sharp corkscrew affair.  Put your square of fabric on top of the chair, affix a screw pin and start twisting.  At least that’s the theory.  While these time-saving devices are quick to screw themselves into anything else, including I might add, body parts like FINGERS, getting them into two layers of upholstery fabric is just not as easy as it looks.   And after I did get five of these suckers in there, turns out they were in the wrong place AND guess what – just as hard to get them out as it is to get them in.

So now it is almost 2 PM.  I have done nothing else today but fool with two squares of fabric.  Two squares, I might add, I could have bought ready-made.  They seemed like a huge rip-off at the time but now?  Not so much.