The Boat Cushion Project

This project is not for the faint of heart - vinyl covered foam boat cushions. I meant to take a "before" picture, but the old cushions were so moldy and nasty that I tossed them without documentation. These particular cushions were made up on a deadline for a Toledo fisherman, and they were a bit of a trial. I've covered boat cushions before, but never sewed vinyl. With piping.

Foam was purchased at The Foam Man in Corvallis and was it expensive! Luckily part of the Foam Man's service is custom cutting so that chore was taken care of. Cutting 3" foam is not easy if you don't have the right equipment.

The vinyl is Marine Vinyl from Jo-Ann's, believe it or not. It's not cheap, and they were the only game in town. I had no time to order online, and it worked out just fine.

The most important thing to know about sewing with vinyl is that every hole shows, so be sure to measure twice, cut once and sew once. It really looks like crap to pull out stitches and if you end up with a cushion that's too small you're out of luck and have to start over. Ask me how I know...

So, on to the good stuff!

The foam was cut and I used it for a pattern to cut the vinyl 3/4" bigger all around. Should have been 1/2" - learn by my mistakes! The edge strips were cut at 4.5", again, too large, but I figured a larger seam allowance would be easier to sew and I could tighten up the seams if I needed to. I allowed more for turn of cloth than I had to, making the end result a bit looser than I liked.



Here you see the first seam. That's 5/32" cotton piping sandwiched in a folded 1" piece of vinyl being held so that the seam is 3/4" from the edge (RS up) of the side piece. Pins aren't possible with this fabric, so I winged it. I was able to cut long 4.5" strips for the side pieces, so I sewed on the piping for the whole cushion in one seam. A zipper foot will allow you to get close to the piping and make it nice and tight.

The next step is to sew the side piece to the flat top (or bottom) of the cushion. In the picture below the row of stitches you see is the WS of the side piece where the piping is sewn on. The piping is sandwiched between the layers -



At this point I switched to a split foot on the machine because the zipper foot wouldn't grip enough surface area of the fabric and it was being pushed to the left. I tried to stay as close to the stitching line for the piping as possible to keep things neat on the RS.

The corner approaches -



You can see that I've started to turn the bottom layer of fabric to turn the corner. I did this in four stages, two stitches each stage, hand cranking the machine -





Almost there -



Continue around, turning each corner the same way until you end up back at the beginning -



Leave a good 3" open to make it easier to match up the ends -



Trim one side, being careful to get the cut perpendicular to the edge and leaving a 1" seam allowance -



Unpick 2" of the seam holding the piping in and line up where the seam should go, being careful that everything will lay flat. You don't want to catch the piping on either side in this seam -



Turn the whole thing RS out and see how it looks -



At this point, only the flat sides have been joined - the piping is loose and there will be a hole where the side joins the top. Turn to the RS again and topstitch close to the seam -



Time to close the gap - turn back to the WS and fiddle with the piping to get it to lay together like it's continuous and finish the seam joining the side to the top -



And here's the finished seam -



Nice and neat!

This particular cushion was mounted to a board, so no zipper was needed, but the corners still need to be trimmed and graded. Here's what it looks like on the inside -



Cut the straight (side) piece in several places around the curve -



And trim a notch out of the square corner (top) like so -



And here's a (bad) picture of the finished corner -



The black cushions were constructed the same way, with zippers being applied to the side pieces before the piping -



The pictures of the zipper installation are total crap, so I won't be posting them ;-) but I can mock up something if anyone has questions - just leave me a comment - I like it!

In the end we wrapped the foam in a layer of poly batting to make it fill out the covers more firmly, using spray glue to hold it steady while it was stuffed in and zipped up. The batting made it easier to slide the foam into the covers, but it was not easy!

I learned a lot about sewing with vinyl on this project -

* It's stiffer and stickier than you might think, but easy to pierce with a regular sewing machine needle.

* It's much heavier than you might think, hard on the hands and wrists to move around on the machine.

* Ripping stitches is a total pain and the fabric tears easily so care must be taken lest you find yourself making a last-minute trip to Jo-Ann's for more fabric.

* Sewing with the RS of the fabric against the feed dogs will tear the coating right off the vinyl - better to sew the piping to the side pieces by eye than to construct the piping separately, and use a zipper foot for that part.

* Switch to a split foot for the main construction, using a firm hand to keep the project from scooting out from under the presser foot.

* Sew slowly - there's no going back!

Here they are in the boat -



Huh. Maybe this is better -



Not really better, is it? Well, fishermen have no patience for staging for blog photos and he needed to get the gear back in there, so I took what I could get. It's done, anyway, and everyone was happy with the job, so I'll call it well done.

Tomorrow - socks! No, really!