Dog Blankets

Dogs can be quite messy. Dogs who are allowed up on the couch are doubly so.

I’m not exactly sure what possessed us to buy new furniture the day after getting a new puppy, but then again, logic doesn’t always factor into decisions, does it? For the first year we were relatively surprised at how well the furniture held up. The second year was a completely different story.

By year two, our La-Z-Boy reclining sofa was quite stained from, well, anything that made contact with it. Elbow grease seemed to be the worst, but was in competition with head grease, as was obvious from the chair arms where one would put their own arms and by the top center of the back where one’s head would rest. This was pretty much a weekly maintenance to clean the crustified grossness, which if anyone has tried cleaning micro-suede knows the near-impossibility of actually getting it to look clean, let alone be clean, thanks to the incredible lack of hiding anything liquid without looking like a poorly done watercolor.

So one evening while sitting down to watch Jeopardy, I took one half and Lucy, our Great Dane, took the other. Apparently it wasn’t comfortable enough for her standards so she did what any normal dog would do and started scratching the couch to fluff up the bedding so to speak and immediately I see she had also torn a hole in the fabric. Before I could stop her she started another one. Well, at this point I’d had enough of her being on the sofa and kicked her off and onto her bed, but the damage was done and within a couple days would be ten times worse.

The original hole was now a foot-long tear with the other three not far behind, and without even realizing it there were a couple on the other side of the sofa too. Needless to say, we kept her off the couch to prevent it from completely falling apart, but then nuts and bolts and parts that hold the thing together started falling off, the recliner handle no long lifted the foot rest portion which now had to simply be grabbed and pulled up, and the back fell off from compromised rivets apparently made from tinfoil. I kid you not, this $1800 sofa is a piece of crap and if it wasn’t so darn comfortable… Anyway, since they were falling apart anyway, our efforts to keep the dog off waned and at night we no long put a dining room chair over the sofa to prevent her from sneaking up there at night. Instead, we put down an old quilt we used to have in the bedroom that my partner’s mom picked up at TJ Maxx not long after we moved into the house, if for nothing else, to hid the embarrassing rips and tears and ghettoness of the sofa.

Needless to say, this blanket-wrapped seat idea was supposed to be a temporary solution until we could find a slipcover for the sofa. Unfortunately finding a slipcover for this type of reclining sofa that was falling apart anyway and probably will completely collapse like a poorly built Lego tower next time we sit in it was crazily impossible, and the cost of custom slipcovers were more than a new sofa. Alas, the ghetto look of an old quilt-covered-cushion will have to stay.

But, after finishing my framed 9-patch quilt in Moda’s Frolic line by Sandy Gervais, I think I’ve come up with an idea for the charm pack I picked up a couple weeks ago. I am going to make new cushion covers. I figure a simple sew-together of the precut fabrics in a square, frame it in the same natural cotton muslin and back it in an orange fleece will not only keep the sofa looking nicer, it’ll tie in to the quilt I plan on putting on the back of the chair-and-a-half. Perhaps I’ll also do this for the fall quilt I plan on making so I can switch it out for the seasons. First I need to make these two and see if they’ll even work out. If not, they’ll probably end up in my Etsy shop! Then again, if they work out, I may make more to put in my Etsy shop for sale! After all, isn’t our Lucy worth the effort?