The Slipcover Diaries, Pipe Down

I used this tutorial for cutting bias strips for the piping for my ottoman slipcover.  http://www.patemeadows.com/Cutting-Bias-Strips-for-Piping-and-Banding_ep_61.html

Bias strips, 2 inches wide.

I used Wrights cording, which washed up nicely to preshrink it.  The fabric is wrapped around the cording and stitched as closely as possible to the cording using the zipper foot.

I made two lengths of piping for the top edge and above the skirt.

Pin fitting the slip cover:
I got a lot of helpful information from Miss Mustard Seed's slipcover tutorial on her blog.  http://missmustardseed.blogspot.com/ The idea with pin fitting is to cut your pieces to generally fit the chair/ottoman section, then pin the the sections together inside-out to the form of the furniture.

Top piece

Side section.  An additional skirt section will be added later.

The piping gets sandwhiched between the top and side fabrics.  The wrong side of all pieces face out. 

I worked my way around and got better as I went.  I had to go back to the start and re-pin some of it a second time, until I got it right.

I left the ends of the piping hanging for now, until I sewed most of the way around.

Again using the zipper foot, I sewed along the pin line right up against the piping, pulling the pins out as I went.  The corners are tricky and needed a few little tucks here and there.  You need to ease the fabric in.
I left the last corner open, then turned the slipover right side out, to figure out the best way to overlap the cording.  I pinned that corner and sewed it into place.  Here is how it came out.  I am going to live with it a couple days and see if I want to try to make any little adjustments.  The corners are not exactly the same, but a little adjustment can fix that I think.  Next comes the comes a pleated skirt, attached to the bottom with another round of piping inserted.  I do best with projects like this if I do a little bit at a time.  If I tried to do it all in a day or a weekend, I would get frustrated and it would come out poorly.