How to Sew a Loveseat or Couch Cover

A decorative couch cover provides you with a quick easy and cheap way to beautify your living room and has some other wonderful advantages. The cover protects the upholstered furniture underneath from everyday dirt and dust. A couch cover is easy to remove and clean which makes pet hair or small children’s messy handprints cleanup a breeze. The choices of material types, colors or patterns give you the largest possible variety of couch covers.

The first step to sewing your own cover is to choose the material. You will need 5 yards. It is important to consider the width of the material. For a love seat, the ideal width is 60″. The material chosen needs to be sturdy yet thin and free falling- unlike corduroy, lint free and have very little elasticity. Material used in quilts and various others are ideally suited for this purpose.

In order to have the lowest price, I recommend looking at the one or two dollar section of your craft store or Wal-mart. Personally, I prefer Wal-mart because of the variety in textures and designs of fabric they sell. Many times the bolt is marked unknown material makeup, but it is just as good.

Cut the yardage in half and cut ends as square as possible. There is extra inches that can be cut off at a later stage.

Placing right sides together, match a selvage edge of one piece with the selvage edge of the other piece. If you are working with stripes or a repeat pattern, match this also. Pin together. If you are planning to use this pattern for a couch instead of a loveseat, add more panels the same way as the first two.

Sew the pinned edge together with a straight stitch. Place the line of stitching as far over as needed to skip touching the selvages. This may be as far as one inch on some fabrics.
Time to do the real work. Throw your couch cover on the target. Position the cover so that the line of stitching runs up and down the center- not long ways! Tuck in to the cushions and elsewhere, being sure to leave extra fabric to sew seams.

After the cover is exactly the way you want it, chose where in the back you want to cut off the extra, and pin. Pull the cover off and lay flat. Cut straight across where you chose.

To finish the couch cover, sew around the entire edge making a twice folded one inch seam. It is finished. Now go throw it on.