Stitched By Sovs: Baby girl's rocking chair

I love hand me downs. When my daughter was born, my mother-in-law gave me the rocking chair she used with her kids. I spent many hours and many nights sitting in that rocking chair with my daughter, and I remember thinking many times how much I should make a cushion for it. Well, after a year and 8+ months, I finally did it.

She likes sitting in it too, as you can see :)

I've had a few questions about why I shaped the back cushion the way I did. It's really just about aesthetics for me. The top of the rocking chair is wider than the seat, and it would have bothered me if the top of the rocking chair was sticking out past the cushion itself. I saw plenty of rocking chair DIY tutorials where that's exactly how they did it, and that's fine... it's just not my thing. Here's how I made mine. I even had my little helper working with me!

I started by measuring the seat and the back of the chair, and drew a template on a piece of cardboard.

Then I traced out the cardboard template onto a piece of foam insert. I picked up a 1" thick foam insert, 24"x 72". This gave me enough to draw one seat back and two seat cushions (I wanted the seat cushion to be thicker than the back cushion).

After cutting out the foam inserts, I traced the pattern on quilter's batting...

I gave myself an extra inch around the template so that I could pin and sew the batting around the foam.

I trimmed away the extra batting as I hand-sewed it closed, that way I could get a nice tight stitch around the foam.

Here's the finished foam inserts:

I set them on the chair, just to make sure the measurements were correct. Then I traced the foam inserts onto the fabric, again leaving about an inch around the insert to allow for the seam.

I hemmed the fabric to give myself a nice, clean edge to work with. Many people choose to just cut the material with pinking sheers. Either way works as far as I'm concerned, hemming just takes some extra time that may not have been necessary.

Once I hemmed the fabric, I sewed a zipper onto the narrow end of each cushion. It's the first time I ever used that function on my sewing machine, and it was easy as long as you follow the directions for your machine. I wanted to have the zipper so that I can take the cover off to wash it whenever needed, especially knowing that she would like sit in it as well.

After I sewed the zipper on the end, I stitched around the other three sides. I used a tight stitch for this. **NOTE**: remember to UNZIP the zipper before sewing around the other 3 sides, it can be difficult to unzip it afterwards in order to turn it right side out... trust me...

Repeat steps for the second cushion cover. Once the machine sewing is done, put the foam inserts into the covers, and set them on the rocking chair.

I bought some coordinating ribbon, 1.5" wide. With the cushions on the chair, I measured how much ribbon I wanted to sew on to tie the cushions to the chair. I chose to put ribbon in 3 locations on each side of the cushions, 2 on the back and 1 on the seat. I did this so that the cushions would be anchored on to the seat a bit stronger. I hand-stitched the ribbon into the cushion, and cut a V-shape into the ends of the ribbon to keep it from fraying. And that's it!