Home Style: Covering a pouf!

In May myself and my family moved into a new house. It is an amazing new home for us but the only problem was... I didn't have any furniture. The plan was i'd go to University and when I came back my bedroom would be finished. However, I came back from Uni a little early and my parents had already smashed up all my furniture and got rid of my bed. Oops.

We managed to find an old mattress for me to use (my dad is a bit of a hoarder) and that was my bedroom. For months I slept on the floor with no cabinets, no where for my things, in a giant double bedroom. It was a little roomy. 

I'll be doing a blog post on my new bedroom when I go back home so look out for that if you want to know the full story. Eventually we bought a new bed and cabinets but there was just something missing. I was searching the pages of Pinterest when it hit me. I NEED A POUF!

Thanks to my Dads hoarding skills he still had one from my parents first ever sofa. Although... tt wasn't exactly the thing I had in mind. 

It's just a little dated to say the least. But I had a vision. 

Firstly the top was attached to the base with elastic straps. Not good. So I snipped them off as I thought it'd be easier to cover than battling between the straps. 

I started with the base and chose a white fabric with a small flower print, just enough to catch the light without being too FLOWER POWER. I admittedly was a little slapdash with this part of the pouf. I literally laid the fabric over the top, stapled it to the bottom and snipped off the edges. 

I folded around the corners of the base so that it would look a little less DIY and a bit more professional. I hope it worked. Next for the cushion.

This was a little trickier as it was round and a domed shape. Far from my usual square fold cushion. 

I started by making a test piece with some old fabric I had in the house so that I could roughly guess the size and shape that I needed. And even if it was completely wrong I could always start over again, thankfully not wasting my expensive fabric. 

To do this I laid the cushion down on the old fabric and drew around the whole piece. Then cut out two of these and sewed them together. 

This gave me a rough shape to work with but it was a little big. So I simply stitched along again about a quarter of an inch to see what size I would need for the cushion... This happened about 5 times. Once I was happy with the size of the fabric I needed I placed it onto my fabric and cut around. 

As you might see from this photo I decided to hem my fabric before sewing it together. This was purely because the opening end of the fabric where the cushion would go into was difficult to sew together and looked INCREDIBLY messy without a hem. Not something I wanted for my 'professional' pouf. So I pined my fabric in place, ironed along the outer edge and hemed. 

Then I sewed the two pieces together and put my cushion inside. It took a lot of wriggling and faffing with the cushion to actually get it inside but IT FIT. Thankfully. 

And here is the finished result. 

I'm really pleased with the result. I really like the contrasting fabrics and it fits in so well within my new room. Ideally I would have liked a more snug fit on the cushion however, I'm not the best sewer in the world and many of my skills are thanks to my Nans tireless efforts when I was a child and trial and error. 

I also had some left over fabric to make tiebacks for my curtains. But you'll have to wait for my room tour to see those.

I hope this gives you some inspiration for your bedrooms and shows you that anybody can attempt a bit of DIY.

Disclaimer: this post is not sponsored.