I have been staring at this ugly, dirty, worn ironing board cover while working like crazy the last couple months. As a bookkeeper, this is a pretty busy time of year with taxes and all that fun stuff but now that April 15th has passed, I get a little bit of time to recover - AND Re-cover (get it? haha!)!
I have looked for a new cover for this ironing board on several occasions but it is not a standard size so they don't have them in any stores I have been to. It is a wider-width which seemed like a great choice to me at the time, especially since I never use my ironing board for clothes but only rather for pieced quilt tops. However, when looking for a replacement cover, that can be a nuisance.
Anyways, I am not an upholsterer so I wanted to find the easiest way to make this happen and, in the end, to have a nice, new functioning cover. So, here's what I did:
I literally laid my fabric on top of the ironing board and left a "bit" hanging over. Then I trimmed around the sides. I roughly calculated in my head the measurement for the "bit" by figuring that I would need enough to make casing for the rope I was going to use to cinch the cover and tie it on to the board. In this case, I decided to leave about 4" hanging down.
Next, I sewed a casing around the edge. I folded up approx 1" and then folded over another 1" and then stitched near the edge, leaving a 4" opening in the seam on one end.
I used a piece of rope that my husband had in the garage and fed it through my casing starting and ending at the 4" opening.
Now the fun part, and I would suggest 2 people for this...
Pull the ropes and cinch up the cover on the board!
I am quite pleased with my final result. I used a remnant of decorator-weight fabric from a previous project and some old rope so even if it doesn't hold up forever, it looks nice for now and didn't cost me anything.
Since this one went so well, I kind of went a little crazy...I started looking around my craft room at all of the other things I could re-cover!
The next victim (ahem) project, was this Ikea office chair. The cover came off years ago and after trying several times to get the original cover back on, it has sat like this for almost a year now. Still useable but very unattractive.
And, I have another small ironing board that is very useful, but also well-loved. As you can see, it needs a new cover!
I searched through my remnants until I found just the right piece of fabric for each of these projects.
In the case of the chair, I auditioned a couple fabrics until I found just the right one.
I used the same steps as above for each of these projects and I had one very successful evening! Pretty happy that I get to use these lovely things to make many more projects.
