One summer job has been waiting in my picture folder for its turn on the blog.
My son bought himself an old Russian car; I will not name it, just in case. Those who know will recognise it from the picture. 🙂 And he gave it a complete body restoration.
From me he ordered new seat covers that would be exactly like the originals.
The originals were of course not merely old and torn but in complete shreds. Holes had been punched into the covers under the edge of the seat, wires threaded through them and pulled tight under the bench. There were canvas pieces over the springs of the backrest too. The padding was still quite decent. That did not need replacing.
The job of taking the old covers off my son took on himself. Which was of course a mistake. I should have studied more closely how they were fixed and how the new ones should be attached to the seat. I should have been sitting right there with my nose in it, not just watching from behind the camera.
I then took the old covers and drew the patterns onto paper. Finding the material took only a couple of days; the client looked it over and pronounced the black thermantine I had bought suitable. The requirement was that the material must not be shiny or have any raised pattern.
I did badly want to make the new ones prettier than the originals, with binding, proper fastenings and so on. But the client is king.
I sewed the new covers following the old ones, which turned out to be a relatively simple job. Instead of corded binding, simply quilting. Here and there between the seams there were reinforcements of 4 mm cord.
In place of the holes under the edge of the bench I set metal eyelets, 100 small holes and 10 metal rings in all. Afterwards my upper arm had an enormous purple bruise from making the eyelet holes and pressing the rings together. 🙂
What can you do when you have little strength and have to hang half your body off the lever.
But it turned out later that those eyelets were entirely unnecessary. The holes for the wire had been punched into the cover for no reason at all, once upon a time. The covers were in fact held on by channels at the edges of the cover with wires pushed into them.
The covers themselves came out nicely.
I must admit that I very much enjoy sewing material like this.
