A Do It Yourself Bench Pad

I made this easy peasy bench seat cover tonight. Little by little I'm trying to dress things up around the house. Guess how much it cost me? Hmm. It was under $20.00! I wanted something shaped similar to the bench pad I found below. The striped one below is a Home Depot bench pad and this mammer jammer goes for $44.98. Woah! It's cute and all but that's highway robbery! 

If you're like me and don't know how to use a sewing machine you can fudge it and not sew at all! I have hand sewn a few things before but still haven't tackled the machine. That is on my long term list of things I want to learn!

So to make your own bench pad you'll need:

Foam Padding

T-Square

Electric Meat Knife

Fabric

Liquid Stitch Glue

Large Safety Pins

Measure out your padding and draw the lines to cut using a marker and the T-square for accuracy.

Time to pull out the electric knife!

Be sure to use the meat blade because you'll need the two separate serrated blades working together to cut through the foam. I tried the bread knife and it didn't work.

I made a mess of my edge! Boo hoo!

Hold the foam tightly, from the end you start cutting from so that you have a nice, clean cut. For me, it was trial and error with a lot of error and a lot of going back and shaving off more foam so there was a smooth edge to work with.  

Here was the FAIL part of my project. My iron is officially a craft iron now and ruined from the last project I did. There is glue on the iron and I accidentally got it on the microfiber fabric when trying to smooth out the wrinkles. Lov-e-ly! It was smack dab in the middle of the fabric too. Fortunately I had enough fabric on either side of the mishap that I was still able to use it for my bench cover. RELIEF because it took a while to find this fabric! Oh yeah, this fabric came from the scrap pile in Old Time Pottery. They have pretty good prices on fabric. You have to weed through the piles though to find the good patterns but it's worth it! 

Liquid Stitch - I feel like I'm cheating with this stuff but until I learn the sewing machine this is what I've got!

Once the foam was cut to size, I more or less wrapped it like a present, gluing it down with Liquid Stitch.

I used safety pins to add extra support. I used six total, four for the length of the bench and one on each end for the flaps on the sides.

That's all it took. It was easy as pie and adds a some warmth to the bench in the foyer.