a quick fix, fabric stamping & a winner

I am still chugging along on my bedroom makeover project. The last couple of weeks have been cold and rainy and since I still don’t like to paint when it’s cold out, my walls are still pink and my ceiling is still dingy. Here’s hoping that this week will be the last days of the pink.

I decided it was a good time to turn my attention to the bench at the end of my bed.

I have to admit that I don’t mind the toile pattern with my matelassé quilt, but it’s still not my favorite. The fabric is dirty and snagged in places and with the new pillow shams it kind of bugs me.

If  you are new here, let me recap by telling you that I have two looks for my bed. The matelassé cover above is my warm weather bedding, while my winter bedding is what I like to call the Hades quilt for how difficult it was to make. It looks so divine on my bed, though, I’m thinking I’ll need to rename it soon.

Again, the bench doesn’t look bad now that it’s not against the muted rainbow that was my bedroom before the makeover began. It’s just not what I want.

Before I could makeover the bench, I needed to do a quick fix. The corner piece that holds the leg on broke and needed some attention.

The welds on the corner piece broke and the fix required me to break out my best McGuiver skills.

I started out with these tools.

Someone wanted in on the picture and wasn’t budging.

What? Me? You want me to move out of your way? I don’t understand. Don’t you love me?

He’s such an attention pig. At any rate, my first fix went something like this.

After I did the steps above, I put it all together and attached it to the bench, using a brace from my old dining room chairs that I’d saved from when I made my chair bench. I put it all back together and it looked like this:

Originally, I didn’t pry off both sides of the grooved pieces, and I used washers to fill the gap on the side that I did pull off. That fix lasted about three days before the failing. I took it all apart again, pried off the other piece, bolted it tightly to the corner brace and then put L-brackets under the corner brace for added support. I don’t have a picture of it but it pretty much looks exactly like the picture above.

I re-stapled the felt underneath and the new fix is holding nicely.

 

The legs are a weird plastic material. I have a set of wooden legs out in the barn so if this fails again, I’ll go to plan C. I do plan to paint the legs, but I wanted to wait until I had the slipcover made.

I know I could reupholster this bench. As far as upholstery projects go, it’s not as hard as a chair, but with the curved arms, it is a bit more complicated. I’ve never made a slipcover and I’d much rather try that first.

I hate picking out fabric. It stresses me out. I had some fabric I liked in mind for the bench and had even bought a yard of it. When I went back to get more, though, it was all gone and since I had a drop cloth from my chair redo, I figured I could just use the drop cloth for the bench.

With all the cream fabrics on the bedding, I didn’t think a plain drop cloth slipcover would be very exciting. I decided to try my hand at stamping the fabric to see if I could create a design I like.

Back in the day, I used to be a big stamper and would get together with a bunch of friends to make cards and other things. After I moved from that town, I’ve rarely stamped anything, but I’ve yet to part with all my supplies.

I pulled out my large hydrangea stamp from Stampin’ Up and used some DecoArt Americana acrylic paint in Light Avacado.

You can see that the stamp is bigger than the bottle of paint, to give you an idea of how large this stamp is. I made up a stamp pad by putting a piece of felt over a scrap of Fun Foam. I squirted some paint onto the felt and rubbed it in with my finger.

This worked out really well. Even though it looks like there is too much paint on the stamp, it inked up the stamp just fine and the extra paint did not blur the image at all.

I have a large piece of Fun Foam that I like to put under my paper or fabric when stamping. It helps me get a crisper image. Because this is such a large stamp, you really need to use two hands to stamp the image.

If you only stamp with one hand, your image is clear on one side where the most pressure was put and muddy/fuzzy/unclear where there wasn’t enough pressure.

I stamped away on all the pieces of the slipcover, prior to sewing it together. I didn’t bother ironing my fabric before stamping and there are a couple of spots where the fabric was folded when I stamped, but I don’t mind. Also, it was hard to get a full, crisp image every time with this big of stamp, but I think the variations just add an aged feel to the fabric. I just randomly stamped the image around the fabric.

Here’s how the fabric looks:

I’m sewing up the slipcover today and hope to show that to you later this week. I’m really excited to work on it and think it’s going to be great accent for the bed.

A couple of things to know. Hubs and I use acrylic paint all the time on fabric. Hubs uses it to make a scout emblem and troop number on t-shirts for his scouts. We never add fabric medium to it and the images have held up through many, many washings. We usually never heat-set the images, either.

Another thing to know is that the paint did dry a bit on the stamp while I was working. I could tell when I started to lose some of the details in the leaves. I had to stop a couple of times and wash the stamp off, but then was good to go again.

Finally, it took about one full bottle of paint (2 oz.) to do the whole slipcover.

Cost Breakdown:

• Bolt & Nut for fix – $1.97
• Paint – $.99

Total Project Cost – $2.96

Total Project Time – About 1.5 hours

Now, for the winner of the Ramsign house number sign, congratulations goes to Jan Elizabeth, who follows me by email. Be looking for an email, Jan!

Have any of you ever created your own fabric design or stamped on fabric? Anyone made a slip cover and have some good advice for me?

Suesan