This has been the longest and most ambitious project to date. Last December (2006), I decided to make an upholstered backboard to my son’s bed with the houses from spongebob on it.
I started by getting a large sheet of plywood and marking the size that I wanted the finished board to be. Then I drew each of the houses on the board.
I used these drawings as the template for all of the pieces. I started by roughly laying out the roads and walk ways.
Then I made the background and laid the roads out on it.
Then I used white tissue paper to make the patterns of the houses. It was around this point in time that I panicked and stopped working on the houses. I wasn’t sure how to put the stuff together to make it look right. Looking back on it, that was probably the right thing to do. I was able to move on with some other sewing projects and got a little more experience.
I picked the project back up in January (2008) and was determined to finish it before my son outgrew spongebob.
I put together the three houses.
Patrick’s was the easiest (being a rock) and squidward’s was also not too bad.
Spongebob’s house had a lot of detail to it so it took a little longer to put together.
I used fabric glue to attach ribbon to the cut out fabric, to give that pineapple look.
Then I made the top to the pineapple.
Once all of the houses were sewed, I needed to permanently attach everything to the background. Once again, I turned to my handy fabric glue. Since all of the houses were stuffed, I had to weigh them down during the gluing process.
I was also happy to give my old physics book and my husband’s old os/2 book a purpose in life again.
With the fabric part of the project done, I needed to turn my attention to the frame that it would live. I used foam batting to upholster the wood.
Then I covered the entire thing in a twin sized vinyl mattress cover (I wanted to try and make this as allergy friendly as I could).
Then I needed some assistance. The actual upholstery job ended up taking 3 people. Here is my mom while we were working on attaching everything to the wood.
And at last…after almost a year and a half it was finished.
We attached it to the wall, put the bed next to it and it ended up a very spongebob happy place.
