Easy-to-Make Floor Cushions from Old Sofa Pillows - Cover Those Ugly Old Cushions with Washable Fabric

When you get rid of the old sofa, the arms may be shot, but the cushions are often in pretty good shape. You can cover them very simply, and have handy floor cushions for when you, or your children, have lots of guests.

You'll want to use fabric that's machine washable and dryable, so the cushions will be easy to keep clean.

Basically, you want to make an envelope, and tuck one end in. You can make the whole thing out of one piece of cloth.

First measure all around the sofa cushion, the longest way. Cut your cloth this long, plus about eighteen inches. This will give you a couple of inches for hems and enough extra for a nice long flap to tuck in. Measure around the cushion the short way, divide by two and add a few inches for seams; that's how wide your cloth needs to be. You aren't trying to make a sausage-tight casing here, but something you can easily put on and slide off for washing. If you make it too wide, you can cut off the extra after you've seamed it, but if you make it to narrow, you'll hate yourself.

Now you have a long rectangle. Fold up and machine stitch the short ends. You now have a long rectangle with hemmed ends and cut sides.

Lay the cloth flat, and put the sofa cushion at one end, with the longest dimension of the cushion aligned with the longest dimension of the fabric. Fold the other end up and around. Mark how far the cushion comes on it. Take the cushion away, and fold the fabric to that mark, so you have a pocket the size of your cushion, and a dangling flap.

On the diagram, the yellow part is the folded up part, and the blue part is the longer part underneath. The green parts are the hems at each end.

Sew up the sides of the pocket. Fold under the raw edges of the dangling flap and stitch them. (Those are the orange hems in the drawing.)

The only halfway tricky part is the front corners. Put the cushion cover on inside out, and pin a line across the point at the end. You want the line you sew to be the height of the cushion, at a ninety-degree angle to the seam. You also want about half of it on each side of the seam line. When you get it right, draw a pencil line and sew it up. You'll wind up with a triangle of fabric that can be cut off or just left there.

These are useful for meetings, for TV watching, even for porch sitting. And they can be made of almost anything. New fabric, of course, would work. But old curtains, an old bedspread, or an old quilt would work as well. You could even use old jeans, cut and patched together, with pockets for your kids to hide their lollipops in. (Washable, remember?)