First, the backstory. Mike and I have done dachshund (and sometimes mixed breed) rescue for well over 25 years. We specialized in rehabilitating biters and normalizing "weird" dogs. The latter is more of a challenge, since "normal" is not generally used to describe our family.
Biggs came to us just over a year ago. He had been a backyard dog - not socialized, not taught manners and he didn't even know his name. We took to calling him "big dog" and that got shortened to Biggs. Biggs is a gorgeous black and silver dapple color and has an almost classic Great Dane profile. However, he looks like a Great Dane that was chopped off at the knees - very short legged and long eared. He's a wonderful and sweet guy, just lives to be loved. But, sometimes, he gets a wild hair and winds up being a little (ha,ha) destructive. When we come home at night, a "happy bomb" goes off and it's "Katie bar the door" until he and his cohorts (the shorter and smaller hunds) settle down.
Before Marshall (his older "brother") the mini red dachshund came to live with us, Biggs had chewed up a couple of store chairs when we left him at the store to have dinner. He gets bored and chewing is his entertainment. Marshall and Biggs are best buddies and partners in crime. They are a real Mutt & Jeff team. One of their favorite antics is for Biggs to steal a roll of toilet paper and Marshall shreds it. Our back patio occasionally looks like a TP party gone wrong!
We have a denim sofa and chair that we bought 10 years ago, when Mike moved to AZ. We reasoned that demim would be a sturdy fabric and would hold up to our population of dogs. Our late Karl had made his mark on the chair when he lost a tennis ball under it. We had to have the front panel re-done. No sooner had the chair come back from the upholstery shop when the sofa suffered a similar indignity.
Since then, the furniture has been relatively unharmed, but the incidents did reinforce my plans to make a recycled denim quilt as an extra cover. We did have a small hole on the top edge of the sofa nibbled by Scooter - about the size of a quarter. I figured I'd fix it "someday when I have time".
Then came Biggs. After he and Marshall joined us, he settled down quite a bit, though we did find cushions from the chair or sofa on the floor once in a while and sometimes with small holes in them. Sometimes, we'd even find the cushions piled up at the doggie door. Thank goodness they were too big to fit through! Other than being ticked off and using "Sergeant words" to express our displeasure, it wasn't that big of a deal. I figured the cushions would wind up with an unintended patchwork design.
For a long time and after using at least a gallon of Bitter Apple spray as a marking/deterrent, Biggs seemed to settle down and except for an occasional roll of toilet paper, nothing succumbed to his destruction.
Then one night, we came home to find that Biggs had made that quarter sized hole "disappear". He did it by removing half of the inside back of the sofa, pulling out some stuffing and leaving the straps exposed. That got lots of LOUD "Sergeant words" and the dogs all cleared out. They know when Mom starts hollering, SOMEONE is in BIG TROUBLE!
I patched it up and vowed to finish my planned recycled jeans quilt sooner. A few nights later - before I could even get my sewing machine out - we came home to find the rest of the back pulled off the inside back of the sofa.
On Christmas Day, I finished my originally intended quilt (see previous blog) and decided that it was too nice to put on the sofa to possibly become a victim to one of Biggs' "playful" assaults. I decided to do a simpler version to cover the back of the sofa - quick and easy. I cut the legs of jeans to 13" long and sewed them together and then connected them with 2" wide strips. Easy! Then I grabbed the staple gun and stapled the whole thing to the sofa. It may not look like something from Martha Stewart, but it looks a lot better than it was!
SUCCESS!! The sofa was repaired well enough that the dog toys and our butts no longer fell through the open back and it didn't look half bad, either.
With that accomplishment under my belt, I went on to work on the pillows. These will be a similar pattern to the original quilt. I got the tops for 5 cushions made, then made the strips to connect the tops. The hard part was assembling everything so that all the pieces lined up correctly. Took a little "frog stitching" (rip it, rip it out) to get it done right, but I was pleased with the first one. While working on it, I came up with a couple of improvements for future cushions, which is even better.
This is what the cushions are SUPPOSED to look like:
Maybe this would be a good time to mention that I didn't have a "pattern" for the quilt or cushions. The entire project has been imagineered (apologies to Walt Disney) with templates for the squares and strips and guesstimates to come up with the correct sizes and shapes to achieve the final result. The final results weren't bad at all, if I say so myself.
The day after I completed the first cushion, I was working on the next one and my sewing machine started sounding funny, so I had to quit sewing until I could get the machine into the shop.
My daughter and her two little ones had been staying with us, and in the rush of getting everyone out of the house, we forgot to put the cushion in a secure place. We came home that night to find the cushion on the floor with a couple of small (fixable) tears and a little stuffing on the floor near it. "Sergeant words" were said loudly and all dogs removed themselves from the target area!
I spent my evening repairing the tears and re-stuffing the cushion, which wasn't exactly on my agenda for the evening.
The next morning, I remembered to secure the pillow in the spare bedroom with the door shut - I thought. We came home that night to find the door to the bedroom wide open and the cushion on the floor in the living room with a trail of cushion innards leading from the bedroom to the cushion. A second casualty was a feather pillow that wasn't quite as lucky - it went out the doggie door and our back yard looked like the aftermath of a bizarre voodoo ceremony with feathers all over. And of course, he had to tear the cushion's fabric, instead of just ripping the seam apart.
This time, in addition to the usual "Sergeant words", I bopped Biggs on the nose with the cushion, while saying "NO, NO, NO!". It didn't hurt him, but he definitely got the idea that Mom was mad! He sat behind Mike for a couple of hours, until he decided that Mom wasn't so mad any more.
When the sewing machine gets fixed, I'll start again. I think I'll incorporate a good dousing with Bitter Apple to remind Mr. Biggs that he needs to leave MY stuff alone!
Here's our miscreant with his final (I hope) victim - doesn't he look so sweet and innocent?
