I’ve finished my garden cushion covers, just as autumn arrived! But even though the weather has been changeable (to say the least) we have been able to try them out in the garden, and in the sun. I should have talked myself into doing these way before now though, as once again the task in my mind was way harder than it actually turned out to be in real life.

I’d seen the outdoor fabric l liked last year and as luck would have it, when I looked again shortly after our new garden table and chairs arrived I saw that it was on sale. So I made a way over the top guesstimate purchase on the basis that I probably wouldn’t be that lucky twice. I guesstimated enough for the four scatter cushions I wanted to make, the two I will make for the garden sofa when it finally moves outside, and some leftovers for anything else I’d potentially want to make after that.

Then I bought the cushion pads from Dunelm, and a pack of multi-coloured zips, and they all sat in our kitchen for most of the summer! It’s amazing though the motivation for filling the recycling bin, and the cardboard box of cushion inners was nagging me, so some research was needed on how exactly I was going to make these cushions.

That’s where Alanda Craft stepped in. I found their zippered cushion cover tutorial, watched the video and read the written instructions and convinced myself that it actually wasn’t that hard. And it wasn’t.

There was conflicting advice on the internet for what size to cut the material for the covers and so I decided to make a toile, which would also give me an opportunity and confidence boost (hopefully!) about putting in the zip. I know, who even am I?

And with the toile made, I really couldn’t put it off any longer…

And the weather gods were smiling on me as we even got to test them out for real in the garden, IN THE SUN! Given that a weather warning followed for the next day we were very lucky weather wise - and the good news is they work, they act like cushions and they look great.

The zips worked out ok too. I purposefully chose bright colours - two cushions have green and two have a royal blue - so that they added a pop of colour, and looked like a design feature - which of course they are. They could be neater, of course they could but I’m happy with them and they work, and don’t look awful!

Was it worth sewing a toile?

Absolutely. I sacrificed a zip, but didn’t sacrifice any material I might actually use at some point. I remembered I’d saved some of the plain covers from some of the furniture we had delivered and that worked perfectly for this - I discovered though it doesn’t like a hot iron so needed to make a quick adjustment for that.

I realised that it would also work for tracing patterns onto, you know the ones that come with magazines, but are printed double-sided so need tracing, which on paper or even greaseproof paper seems a bit of task to avoid as not only do you have the tracing to do, you then have to stick them all together (though a tip there I’ve seen online is to sew them together using your machine, rather than using sellotape). The pieces of this cover fabric are relatively large so that would hopefully be minimal too.

As you can see I could leave myself plenty of clues along the way for repeating this on my four cushions, and it allowed me to test the size to cut the material. I started with this one cut at 45cm for a 42cm pad, but found it too large, so reduced it by 1cm for the actual covers. This was reduced by a small amount more as I overlocked all the edges - again that was definitely worth doing, as the material was quite partial to fraying, and of course it will give some longevity to these covers. I’m not planning to replace them anytime soon, in fact the seating pads we’ve used up until now I bought in 1999/2000, so it isn’t something I change that often!

Now of course I wish I’d started much sooner, but at least they are done!