Sewing the new cushions

My wife and I picked out some good outdoor upholstery fabric with a nice Seventies print.  It was great -- Fabricland had everything 50% off store-wide, so we bought 4" thick foam, thread, zippers and curtain material too.

Out with the old, and in with the new!  (This is the old stuff, by the way.)

The first step in making the new cushions was to cut the foam to size and shape.  I used a cheap "boning" knife that I bought at Dollarama to cut the foam, and it worked quite well. We lay the old cushions on top of the new foam and traced around it using a felt tipped marker.  Bolerama had a link to a pattern for the rear cushions and we double-checked the accuracy of our tracing against the dimensions on the pattern.  We cut the front bench cushions using just the outline of the old ones.

Preparing a section of "boxing" that has a duvet zipper in it.

The sewing took my wife several days to do.  She hadn't done much sewing in the last 10 or 12 years, but she had a good how-to book on cushions, slip-covers and simple upholstery.  I think she did an excellent job.  Unlike some cushions we'd seen on some Boler restoration web postings, where they kept things simple, we chose to do piping on all the edges.

Joining two pieces of boxing.

This meant a lot of extra sewing -- several times around the perimeter of each cushion.  I think she made 40 yards of piping.  Her sewing machine conked out on the second day, and she had to take it to a repair shop for a $100 cleaning and adjustment.
The cushions all look great, though, including "the banana", which I think is the proper name for the skinny bolster that sits behind the upper bunk when it's folded down as a front bench.

"The Banana": no zipper and no piping on this one.  It was tricky getting the foam into the cover.  Just a couple of jokes about stuffing the banana in the dining room.  Middle aged humour, I guess.

I'll have to post pictures when the cushions are installed in the trailer -- they're done now, and they look great, but they need some visual "context".  Stay tuned.