Archive for January, 2010

A few weeks ago, I bit the bullet and came home with my trunk loaded of moulding from Lowe’s. It was a long weekend with plenty of time to figure this out. The worst that could happen was that I ended up returning anything I hadn’t cut. I was bolstered by a sense of confidence from several other blogs out that have shown their beautiful results with trims and moulding.

I’d been wanting to do this on our stairwell for a *long* time. It turns out kids are incapable of walking up the stairs without dragging their hands beside them. It’s just a fact of life. It led to a messy wall that was impossible to touchup with paint or clean. No matter what I did, the big expanse of wall was unsightly. The touchup paint never matched, and the worst part is that the stairwell wall is two stories tall.

It’s hard to get a sense of scale here, but the chair rail moulding is actually approximately 68″ high here. The first thing we did was cut the pieces and tape the moulding into place to make sure everything looked right. If I hadn’t fallen asleep so often in geometry class growing up, I probably could’ve figured out these angles up the stairs and skipped the dry fitting stage. The 45 degree angles were simple–but the angles going up the stairs were a bit trickier.

Once I felt good about the way everything looked, we nailed the moulding into place. Once the moulding was all permanently attached to the wall, we caulked around the edges & miters. Then we painted. I would say the most tedious part of the entire project was caulking and painting. We used semigloss paint to match the baseboards in the house. Semigloss finishes are always tricky for me to get the sheen just right.

Here’s how it looks all finished and painted up. Now, when the wall gets marked up (which it will), I can simply repaint the area below the chair rail without any trouble!

We did this job with a miter box only. I have to say it was not very difficult. I can’t imagine how much easier it would have been with a real tool.

There were several blog sources were so helpful in taking on this project. Check them out!

Thrifty Decor Chick

The Devine Home

Just Beachy

A Soft Place to Land

Now that we have our bias strips cut, we need to join them end to end to create a long strip, cover our cording & apply it to the pillow face.

First to join the separate pieces of bias strips. Each of your strips will have angled ends as shown (below).

Now you’ll want to baste stitch your cording into place. A zipper foot works best for this. This is simply to keep the cording encased in the bias trim. If you get really good at the whole process of working with trim, you’ll find you can encase the cording and assemble the pillow all in one step. But, when just starting, it’s good to go ahead baste stitch your cording.

Now we’re ready to baste the cording on to the pillow’s face fabric. I’ve finished the edges of the pillow’s face and backing fabric. It’s nice to do that to keep things from unraveling inside. If the pillow doesn’t have a zipper, it’s not necessary to finish the interior edges since you’ll never access them. But since we’ll have a zipper, I serged those edges. If you don’t have a serger, you can do a zig zag stitch right over the edge on your regular sewing machine, and you’re good to go.

Apply the cording to the face of the pillow (below). Note to start stitching about 1 1/2″ from the end of the cording. This will allow us to join the beginning and ending of the cording when the time comes.

Sooner or later, you’ll come to a corner. You’ll need to do a little surgery on your cording to get it to turn a nice 90 degrees at each corner. Your pillow is square after all. Here’s a diagram below:

 

Here’s a pic of cutting at a 45 degree angle to allow the cording to turn at the corners (below). When you get to the corner and need to turn, drop your needle down to hold things in place, raise your foot and turn everything 90 degrees to head up the next side. Once turned, lower your foot and start sewing. Since your needle was lowered, you can pick up right where you left off.

Keep going all the way around, cutting your corners as you go. When you come back around to the beginning of the cording, it’ll look a little like this below. Cut the cording about 1 1/2″ past the starting point.

Next you’ll need to trim the cording itself inside the strip, but not the strip. To do this, I open up the stitches that are holding the cording inside and reveal the cording. When all is said and done, you’ll want your edge to look continuous, without an overlap. So you’ll need to trim the excess cording inside. It’s a smart idea to put a piece of tape around the cording before trimming, but I didn’t do that here. The cording can fray, and become a little unwieldy, so I’d suggest taping first.

See how I sort of ‘peeled’ the fabric away from the cording in order to trim it inside (above)? Now it’ll join, and I have some extra fabric to turn under and finish off the seam (below).

I turn under the raw edge (above) and rewrap the fabric over the cording. Now I can sew it into place (below).

You can see the turned under edge above. There are of course, lots of ways of joining and finishing this seam. This is what I’ve found easiest to show and explain. Once you do it a few hundred times, you can do it even fancier where you actually join your bias strips together at this seam, thus eliminating that little fold detail.

Next you can apply your backing fabric, insert your zipper, stuff it with your pillow insert and you’re done!