This is the fun part! I filled my hassock with anything and everything, as long as it was soft… and then I got to play with the staple gun!
I started the filling process by laying down a large sheet of thin fleece interfacing. I wanted a “buffer layer” since my wool has some stretch tendencies and this thin layer of fleece helped guarantee that the outside wouldn’t turn out lumpy.
I started by using polyfil to fill in the corners to make sure they’d be well-defined.
Next, I filled the cushion with fleece scraps, as you can see in the top picture. I picked this for multiple reasons.
1. I had a giant bag of the stuff, since I like to save it to stuff arthurs, and I had a ton of scraps from making all ten of my pink stars
2. It’s free and it’s soft
3. It was something I would have thrown away, so I was being un-wasteful
4. I wanted it to be something squishier/rounder than just a block of foam, since my foam fit-test was a very unexciting, flat cushion.
5. Most importantly… it’s dense enough that I knew it would keep its shape and last over time, unlike Poly-fil or foam that can sag with age if you aren’t really careful at the beginning!
So fleece scraps formed what would be the top layer of “squish” in my cushion.
Next came a huge amount of these foam french fries! These are from that super cool packing foam that is about 3″ thick but comes perforated, so you can tear apart what you need to protect your item during shipping. Even though it’s packing foam, it’s very high quality. I had a whole sheet of this perforated foam and I just tore each french fry away from its neighbor to make this mountain of squishy goodness.
Click on to see all the staple-gunning and tufted button adventures ahead!
(more…)