Did I mention that IKEA is just up the road from us? Yes, it only takes us about five minutes to get our hands on some Swedish meatballs 🙂 I like IKEA for a lot of reason, but mainly because you can get a lot of basic things at decent prices. I like that they actually offer quite nice fabric qualities, like linnen and durable cotton and I like that they have basic wood furniture that you can paint and add your own touch to.
When I went there last time , the above was exatly what I needed. I was looking to revamp my old couch on the porch, with pillows and garden cusions. I could have gone the traditional way and just bought some typical garden cushions, but I found that they were very boring looking, unless I wanted to spend a huge amount of money. I would still be needing decor cushions, and I had given myself a budget of about 50 dollars. I know that doesn’t sound of much, but I do like a fun challenge.
So after strolling around for a while, I finally ended up in the clearance department with a mind set on solving this and making it look like the most comfy summer couch around 🙂 I went straight for those big crates they have with all sorts of ‘left over’, ‘demo-models’, ‘dirty-on-front’ textiles. I didn’t have my mind set on any particular colors, but I always find myself dragged towards those earthy corlors. I started going through the crates, dragging one piece of textile into my cart after the other, picking only linnen and cotton fabrics in brownish, greyish and pale colors.
When I was done, I had a cart full of brown, gray, white and blue linnen cushion cases. A big brown knitted cotton blanket, several pieces of cotton and linnen fabric, pillow feather insert and a couple of cute and lovely textured kitchen towels. All of this together would of course be way more than my 50 dollar budget stand for, but there was also way much more than I needed. The really cool thing, though….get this; the prices on these things, were at least half of and some of the linnen cushion cases was only 1,5 dollar. Now it’s fun to shop, right 🙂
So I had to decide what I needed and leave everything else behind. For the couch I would need 3 big pillows for the seat and 3 for the back of the couch + various cushions to make it look comfy. I decided that I would make the big brown blanket into a three-piece seat (see tutorial in this post) for the couch and then fill in with 3-4 big sturdy pillows for the back. All I needed to add to this, was more pillow filling and I was done.
Take a look below on how it turned out. I think it looks pretty comfy. Don’t you?
Like the pillow with the flower motif? I actually made it from kitchen towels. Here’s the tutorial.
I hope you enjoyed these tips and tricks on how to make a great bargain at IKEA, and maybe you have even been inspired to create something fun and different for your summer couch.
