Making A Love Seat Cover

My front porch love seat with it's brand new blue, ever so soft love seat cover for $3.50.

Making A Love Seat Cover

I am so tickled with the results I had to share. Do you have an outside love seat that's seen better days?

Mine wasn't bad yet but it was - well, orange. More of a terra cotta, ceramic plant kind of orange but orange, and a plastic nevertheless.

This plastic orange love seat works well in hot summers but not so much in cold winters.

The front porch love seat was fine for hot summer days but it looked out of place after last year when I repainted all of my garden benches a wonderfully uplifting blue. They now stand out nicely among the greenery, or winter drab, and give Bluebird Gardens a bit of a nod.

My formerly-red garden bench had a new back added and a couple coats of blue paint.

Although I knew I would eventually have to tackle the front porch, for winter I just draped a soft tan throw over it so I could sit out on the bench and watch it snow, or rain, or just sit.

Although it was warm, the throw moved around a lot and still didn't look quite right.

A temporary tan throw over the orange love seat was hard to sit on without losing the throw.

How hard could it be to find a blue love seat slip cover, I thought to myself. Well, it was not an easy search. There are a number of beige, brown and black ones but few in the matching blue. I finally located one for $229 not counting $14.95 shipping.

Not wanting to spend that much money on a seat cover that may be visited by squirrels, birds and my grungy pants, I started looking through local thrift stores hoping I might find something there that was better than orange. Yes, my expectations were pretty low but anything would have been better than the plastic orange.

These two pre-owned 50x60 inch throws were the perfect blue color for $4 for both.

At the local Goodwill store, I found two 50x60 fleece throws originally from Walmart in the perfect blue color. I thought I would have to sew the two together to have enough fabric but I wasn't sure so I picked both of them up.

A few pins in the right place and I cut off all four throw edges to give it a fit at the corners.

Cutting off the 50x60 inch throw corners and sewing them gave the love seat a finished look.

I added elastic all around the edge. leaving each of the corners with a gap in case I needed to adjust the elastic tension:

Leaving the back of the seat cover open at the corners allows me to easily adjust the elastic.

Not only does it nicely fit in with my other garden benches, but I made two, one for when the other one is in the wash.

Total price? $7. The fleece blankets were $2 each, then I used about $3 in elastic. If I deduct that from the $245 I was initially going to spend, that leaves a nice little account to buy plants. It's a family joke, I grew up learning several different ways to do math and one of my brothers calls that my "gardening math."

I'm going outside to sit on my new front porch blue bench and dream about what new plants I will now buy. On sale, of course!

Charlotte