Let sleeping dogs ...

I've sewn all sorts of things over the years - including many curtains and some bedding but I have limited experience of making other furnishings.  

Many years back, I made cushion covers for Erin's bedroom space in a small "bubble" van.  Those covers were quite simple and were finished with hand-stitching, to avoid the need for zippers.

Fast forward to now, when I've had a lot more experience of zippers, albeit on small-scale zip pouch projects.  

After a fair bit of YouTube research, I felt reasonably confident of creating a zip cover for Bandit's custom dog bed. 

Given my level of confidence, I decided to make two covers - a waterproof under layer and a soft corduroy top cover.  Yep, call me keen!

Nick cut the foam cushion to size, from the mattress that came with the Spacevan (which we chose to upgrade).  

Another piece of foam had been used to fill the gap between the Mahindra's two rear seats, to give Mr Dog more room to stretch while we are travelling.  

No purchases were necessary to create the dog bed.  The under layer was made from an upcycled waterproof sheet and the outer cover used fabric from my infamous stash (a bargain opshop purchase from quite a few years ago).  The shorter zips were also opshop buys, sourced from the stash.  The longer zips are upcycled from rooftop cargo bags that deteriorated.  Had I bought the four zips from Spotlight even with a coupon, they would have been $25.00.

Some of the cover construction was new to me, so there was a lot of muttering as I battled through the first one, with constant reference to the YouTube tutorial - while eating jelly snakes! I did better on my second cover (and now know a lot more about altering zippers) but even so, I needed to finesse/fudge a little. I'm pretty chuffed to have finished though - and really like how the two covers work together.

Most importantly, Mr Dog seems happy with the new arrangement and we're hoping he likes sleeping there a lot more than crowding in with us!