For quite a while now I’ve been longing for some enormous cushions for our sofas. The kind you can all snuggle into on movie night. Which can be thrown on the floor for small peeps to lie on. Which make a comfy place for you to rest your head for a quiet nap. Our 20″ cushions really weren’t cutting it, so when I saw the 26″ Inner cushion pad at Ikea, I snapped up 4 of them without hesitation.
I’d also been struggling to find some fabric which would co-ordinate with the existing curtains, was tough enough to stand up to family life, but which wasn’t so expensive that I’d have hissy fits every time a child went within 500 yards of it. Ikea came to the rescue with their Lenda fabric @ £4 a metre.
So far so good. At this point I’d only spent £28 on the cushion pads and 3 metres of fabric. I just needed thread and zips. But 26 ” zips retail at about £2.70 more or less. That’s £10.80 for the 4 zips…about 40% of the cost of the pads and fabric. I’m sorry…I’m not falling for that.
Enter the old soft-furnishers favourite secret….continuous zip.
You buy it off the roll in metres. It’s about a £1.00 a metre.
The little packs of sliders are about £1.30. They are really easy to attach…this video shows it very clearly.
So thanks to our good friend the continuous zip, I kept the cost down to about £8.50 per cushion and now we can squish on the sofas to our hearts content.
Result! Now I really must do something about the covers on those smaller cushions. 😉
Lovely cushions and that comes in pretty cheap for each one. When I had my year out before Uni, I worked in garment construction (awful job) and they used continuous zips for everything. They had huge boxs of sliders and a little holder for them. The sliders went in upside down in the holder and then you took a left and a right side and just pushed them through the gaps in the sliders at speed and the zip was ready to be finished. We used to do 100’s in a day. It is a very quick way to insert zips too as there is no turning. Xx
Thank you…I didn’t want anything fancy but I was super picky about the colour so I’m really pleased with how well they co-ordinate. Wow…I can’t begin to imagine having to put 100s of those wee sliders on – fancy holder or no. Mind numbing. Although I once worked in a factory and spent all day blowing foam filling into cushion pads. Hot, stinky, dull. Glad my only cushion work these days is sewing covers. 😉
They look fantastic and wow – what a great tip! My mind numbing job (that was actually an interview) was a day spent at Zandra Rhodes studio supposedly being interviewed for the day for a design apprenticeship aged about 19 …they had several of us just sewing beads on by hand to chiffon for hours. No one spoke to us or gave us a drink – real sweatshop conditions. After a couple of hours I got up and walked out! Didn’t think there was going to be much of a future there for me 🙂
That sounds dreadful. It’s not cool to treat folk like that just because you know they’d do pretty much anything for the job.
These zips are fab. You can get them in all sorts of colours and weights on eBay.
That’s worked out really well, there is something wonderful about big cushions
Everyone loves them. Boy was home from school yesterday feeling under the weather (he’s fine now) and spent the day snuggled into one, under a quilt, happy as a clam.
So lovely – I’m jealous of how graciously you’re going through renovations and crafting your own interior design – with 2 little kids and a dog! You should be seriously proud of your fortitude.
Ah, the power of the internet that I’ve got you fooled that I’m being remotely gracious about this. 😉 I can hear the husband roaring with laughter at the thought.
I loathe being all topsy turvy and cannot wait for it all to be done.