Our colors of India...

When we got married, we had one piece of sit-able furniture in our livingroom - our beloved burnt orange couch.  Oh the fond memories I have of retrieving that beauty from the streets of downtown.  There we were, biking along on our way home from a game night with our friends, late at night, everything was dark, sprinkles of rain were starting to fall, when lo and behold, Isaac's keen eye ran across the couch sitting on the side of the road a few blocks from my house.  The long version of this story would be quite entertaining, however being that this is not the point of this story, I'll suffice it to say that five blocks of heavy lifting, hours of scrubbing, vaccuming, re-stuffing, and sewing later, we had ourselves our one and only piece of furniture for our guests to relax on.  A couple months into our marriage, we did make this bookshelf that doubled as a bench of sorts, however to be totally honest, it was a tad too narrow to actually provide a comfortable sitting area for longer than about five minutes.

Fastforward a year and a half, and I am getting quite antsy for another piece of furniture that is a)super comfortable as our orange couch is on the harder side of things and b)large enough to house two or three guests so we can have a dinner or movie night without having to stick our friends on the floor. 

Enter this couch. 

I can't even believe I'm actually sitting on it in this picture, it was so soiled and narly.  Isaac found her at a rummage sale downtown, and picked her up for $25 with a vision of a completely made-over elegant couch in his mind.  It fit my qualifications of squishy and comfortable, and it fit Isaac's qualifications of not overstuffed, and interestingly ornate.  Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we were about to embark on our first reupholstering project. 

And it actually went really well!  We were inspired by Squint's designs, but wanted to have our own take on it as well.  We chose a colors of India theme and off we went.  As it turns out, upholstering a couch is basically pulling material super tightly and stapling it.  Basically.  We started by removing all of the old fabric, keeping track of how it was originally upholstered so we could get an idea of how we would go about putting the new stuff on.  We actually kept each old piece and then used the measurements to make the new pieces, which helped erase a ton of what would have otherwise been an awful lot of guess work.  Then we laid all the new fabric out on the kitchen floor and sewed all the strips together so we could be working with larger sections instead of one small piece at a time. 

  

Here's Isaac pulling the back into place... 

 Almost done... 

 

 

 Cushions and detail pieces complete...

Voila!

I do realize that our style is not necessarily the same as other people's, but being that we are quite different from most of the people we know, it didn't surprise me at all when, upon emailing my family the finished pictures, we recieved from all three of them an enthusiastic, "It looks great...if you like all those colors together in your house..."  Which they probably would not, but we definitely do.  We LOVE this couch!  It's the first thing we see when we walk in the front door and it brings such color and vibrance to our little place.  And when we have chairs the same shade of teal and an eight foot tall cabinet in the kitchen a similar shade of purple, not to mention scores of green plants all around the house, it's really right at home in our little place.