Slipcovers (Work) and Some Play

Here is the work part!  This is one of four dining room chairs for our beach house.  They are upholstered with pseudo-leather and perfect for young kitties to climb and scratch on so something has to be done as the four rather large chairs are now all resident in one of the bedrooms with the door closed.

My thought was to cover them with pseudo-suede and I think I have enough of black to do it.  Not sure the correct approach to doing this but I did it thusly:  First I made some really rough patterns using newspaper.  I cut out some muslin using those pattern pieces and then  pinned them together on the chair.  I will then sew them together with a basting stitch and see how they fit -- I don't care if they aren't perfect.  I will then mark the seams and put notches where things meet.  I will the cut the pieces out of the suede fabric for one chair and again see how it looks.  Only then will I do the other three chairs.  I need to get them done before my yearly Bridge ladies come for our Wilmington tournament.

This was a block I did not too long ago that I wasn't crazy about so it became a candidate for play.  I cut it first into four pieces and rearranged them so the outside corners were in the middle but this wasn't much of an improvement.  I then cut it again resulting in 8 pieces.  I tried several variations of twisting and turning but nothing really worked.

I finally rearranged them into this spiral and decided this was my best bet.  I decided white as a background would work the best as well.  I had to fiddle a little bit to make the pieces that make it into a square.  Four of the white pieces are triangles the same size as the original triangles and four were large rectangles that I sewed onto the other four triangles and then trimmed down to size (rather than calculating what I would need).

The on to auditioning borders.  Nothing too complicated.  This was my second thought - the first was reversing the two borders but too much green.

I went through my stash again and found this deeper purple and decided that I would just do the one border but make it about six inches wide all the way around and then use the green for binding.  So now to think about the quilting.

This is another of the less than desired blocks in its original configuration.

Here I have rearranged  it and like it better.  Have to decide what kind of sashing to put between the  panels.

This is the third one I cut up and this is the before picture which I do kind of like but think it is because I rearranged the four pieces from their original configuration.

Here is the rearranged pieces with the purples in the middle.  I like it too so will have to make a decision before too long about which configuration to make into a quilt