Hasta La Ideas

I want to be able to make a leather sofa, and a messenger bag, and an iPad case. Stuff made with fabric. So a few months ago I decided to learn to sew, because although all of those items exist in the marketplace, the available designs don’t appeal to me. In the true ID spirit, I figure I should learn what I need to learn in order to make these things myself.

Three ways I can think of to learn something new are go to school for it, get an apprenticeship or learn it from a book. Sure there are Instructables and YouTube videos, but in the absence of curation you can spend a lot of time wading through junk. I found a couple online tutorials on how to build a sofa, and they were the ugliest goddamn things I’d ever seen–I wouldn’t buy ’em for ten dollars if they came with a twenty stuffed between the cushions.

I looked into a local upholstery class, but the fabrics they work with are light, frilly things. I want to sew heavy-duty stuff like leather and vinyl, not gauzy stuff that comes in flower prints. And I couldn’t find any books on how to make a sofa, but I came across a book on automotive upholstery on Amazon and ordered it, figuring if you could make leather car seats and benches you could probably adapt that knowledge to couches.

The photos inside the book are almost worthless–tiny, grainy black-and-whites where you can’t make out crucial details–but the information inside seemed good.

Now it was time to find a machine….

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