today I'm going to show you how to make your very own ottoman the basic process for making the ultimen is quite simple you're going to need a few different products and basically you're going to put it together to form a frame and then you're going to coat it in fabric and foam so to show you the basic process before we actually go ahead and make it you're going to need two planks of plywood approximately eighteen millimeters thick then you're going to cut whatever shape you want out of that plywood so you need to cut two of whatever size then we're going to use that plywood as a top and a base for our Ottoman so you could do this with a round piece of plywood it doesn't have to be rectangular it could be square whatever shape you want you're then going to need some longer thinner planks of wood you'll measure how high you want your Ottoman to be and then you'll cut those into strips you'll use those strips to support the in-betweens of your Ottoman so that creates your frame then we're going to add a piece of foam on top of that wooden frame that we've created you have a make it nice and soft to sit on so it's actually going to be a little bit higher than whatever we measure these lengths at so let's say we want a 50 centimeter high Ottoman we would probably allow about seven centimeters here so then whatever the difference is we need to allow that there so let's say that's 43 centimeters here after we've created our basic frame with our foam on top we'll coat it with warnings also a panel of wanting to the sides and then we'll do this same with the fabric and then it all just gets stapled on so it's really quite easy but I'm gonna show you the exact process now so to get the basic measurement before my Ottoman I laid a piece of fabric in this case I've used a towel on the floorr and I've just sort of marked out how big I want it to be just using the towel as a bit of a visual so underneath I've got my plank of wood and I've got my ruler on there as well so my towel is showing me how much I want to chop off of my wood and then I've measured that size to be about 100 centimeters by 60 centimetres so my next step would be to mark that measurement out onto two of my plywood panels so next we need to figure out how tall we want the Ottoman to be so I've decided I would like it to be a little bit shorter than the height of my couch cushions so I'm going to aim for about 40 centimeters with my ottoman so next I'm going to mark out how long I need to cut each cut each of my panels of wood so to work out how many planks of wood you'll actually need to go around your ottoman you need to imagine that you want to place them at the most probably about 25 centimeters apart that way it will be nice and sturdy so for my Ottoman I've got 100 centimeters on my long side and I've got sixty centimeters on my short side so if I were to place them 25 centimeters apart on my long side that's quite easy because that divides evenly into 100 so I'll have one plank at the quarter mark one plank at the halfway point and another at the 3/4 mark I also want to have them on the corners so that the corners are nice and supported so that means I'll have one two three four five planks now obviously I've got two long sides on my Ottoman so I need double that so that's ten planks for my long sides for my short sides I probably won't play some 25 centimeters apart because that won't go nice and evenly into 60 so instead I'll do them 20 centimeters apart so I can have at one third and that two thirds so 20 centimeters to here I'll have a plank and then another 20 along so 40 from the end I'll have another plank and then again I want to have them at my corners so even though I've got one on this side in my corner I want one on the short side as well so that means I'm going to have one two three four planks on my short side and obviously I've got two short side as well so that's eight planks for each of the short sides so in total I've got ten for my long sides plus eight for my short sides so I need eighteen planks at 33 centimeters echh so to give you a bird's-eye view of what that should look like imagine you're looking at it from the top here this is our long side this is 100 centimeters this our short side this is 60 centimeters so we had one two three four five on our long side same on the other side one two three four five and then enough short sides in the corner again we had one two three four and then on the other side we had one two three four so if you really wanted to you could count those so you've got one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirty forty fifty sixty something eighteen so we know we've got the correct I'm out there so next step now that we've cut out our wood and we've cut out a little place is to just roughly mark out where each of these are going to go and then we're going to glue them down so start with a piece in each of the corners now pretty much marked out where all of the planks of wood are gonna go just in those black little rectangles there so now we're just going to fill them with glue I'm going to use our black glue that's a personal favorite of mine doesn't have to be this clear any wood glue or anything strong is going to work so just use whatever you've got so what I've done now is I've positioned my planks where I want them to sit I know that some of them will cut a little bit wonky so I've just positioned them so that they're gonna stand up nice and straight if they're a little bit wonky I've left the wonky bits on the top when we screw it up together it's not really gonna matter it's all gonna get packed in with fabric and foam so don't worry if you've cut it a little bit unevenly and so long as they're 99% the same length and 99% straight they will be fine so now I'm going to mix my arrows right glue my arrow black glue is a 2-part glue so you have to have the two bits mixed together and you might want to put some gloves on if you're using arrow diet just because it is a little bit sticky and it does not feel nice if it gets stuck on your fingers and I'm just going to use an old knife and a little plank of wood to mix them so you can see it comes out in two parts I'll start putting it on the basis where I've marked out my squares and if you find they drop just put a little bit sticky tape on them to hold them in position making sure that lining right up with the outer edge if you're doing this inside make sure you put a little bit of fabric down on your table as well so it doesn't get dirty so when you get to your corner point pieces just make sure that you pull a little bit in between the pieces as well so not just on the base but actually along the edge and that way you will make sure that they're gonna stick together nicely so our next step will be to put glue on the tops of all of the little planks so that we can stick the other panel over the top of all of them so we want to put it on reasonably soon after we've done the base layer so that we can get that top one on and make sure these are all lining up straight because if they're not if there's still a little bit wet we can toggle them and make sure they move eventually we will put screws in them so don't worry if they don't all meet exactly because the screws will help to hold them in position now as you can see I've started drilling screws into each of the panels this is important because the glue won't necessarily hold it in exactly the right position and it won't be as strong as it probably should be you can drill pilot holes if you want to but I'm just going for it and you can get someone to hold the panel if you want to because you'll find that some of them have moved a little bit so you just need to push them back into position in case some of them aren't sitting quite where I'm putting two screws in each just to make sure it's nice and sturdy so now I've got something that looks like this and obviously we don't want to leave these gaps in between here because that will mean that if you kick it or something the fabric might test we want to put something that's gonna be nice and pulled tight and nice and hard in between so you could put solid panels of wood there if you wanted to but for me I'm just going to use a pretty non stretchy reasonably thick cotton fabric and I'm going to pull it really tight and put it all the way around here so first of all I'm gonna measure how high my fabric is because although my planks were 33 centimeters now I've got this a little bit of extra wood at the top and bottom here so now wait so now I've got almost 37 centimeters so I might just cut 38 just to be on the safe side and then I'm also going to cut enough to go all the way around and I already know those measurements because I cut out 100 by 60 so instead of cutting one panel that's going to go all the way around the Ottoman to say fabric I'm going to cut two strips so I'm going to do a long side and a short side and then I have another strip for the other long side and for the other short side that way I'm not going to cut one long piece and then not using all the rest of that fabric there so this is just some scrap material I found you can use anything it doesn't necessarily have to be the same color as whatever you decide to use for your after fabric this is just laying around okay so I'll start by marking out the height that we said so I might actually just go 40 just to be really sure I'm not going to and remembering we want to go all the way along a long side and then all the way around one of the short sides so that makes it 160 centimeters that we need to cover but allowing for a little bit of overlap and for the fact that the fabric is going to be pulled a little bit let's make it three and seventy just to be on the safe side so obviously if you were cutting out enough to go around a circle you would need to calculate the circumference of the circle so you need to use your radius which is half the width of your circle so let's say your circle was 60 centimeters wide you wouldn't use your radius which would be 30 centimeters wide and then you would just calculate two times pi times your radius so two times pi times 30 and that will give you your circumference so how much you need to go around the Ottoman so remember I said I was going to cut two lengths so to save marking it out with the ruler twice I'll just use my other pre-cut piece I'll use that as a guide and just cut around that so now I'm going to use my staple gun to staple this panel of fabric all the way around the edge of the Ottoman so this is just going to fill in the gaps in between so the top layer is pretty simple you just want to go all the way around and you also want to make sure that you're pulling it reasonably tight so it's always good to maybe have a friend who can help you with that so I'll just start by securing this edge just so that when I start to pull it here it's not going to yank away from that bit this is the important edge you need to make sure that as you go around you're yanking this fabric up as far as you can possibly get it before you put the state police if you don't this fabric will still be floppy you need to pull it as tight as you can so that it's hard in between so you should be able to see now that it's quite hard quite solid in between those planks if you're not getting a saw hand doing this you're probably not pulling hard enough so either yank really hard and take a break in between if you need to or get a friend to come and help you hold it just be really careful of their fingers when you're stapling so now that you've finished stapling if you've got any that didn't quite go in right don't worry about pulling them out just hammer them down so that they're not want to get caught on the next layer of fabric that goes over the top so now you can see I've stapled the blue fabric all the way around the edge of the Ottoman and I've trimmed off the excess so my next step has been to place the Ottoman onto a sheet of foam this one's already had pieces cut out of it and then I have drawn a black line showing how big my Ottoman is so that when I remove it from the foam I'll have a line to cut along so now that I've got my black line drawn on my phone I can start cutting it out so to cut it I'm just going to use a stanley knife and I'm just gonna carefully slice through the foam trying to keep it Stanley knife is straight up and down as possible don't worry about lumps and bumps because they're all going to get covered when we put some wadding over the top of it later because I'm using a scrap of foam instead of buying a new sheet I've got a little bit missing here that was used to cut out another Ottoman so I'll just fill that in with another bit of bit of foam later on so here's the ultimen all ready to go with the foam on top and that little extra bit that I have to cut off just to fill in that gap so the next step is to secure the file to the top of the Ottoman now normally I would use something like this it's a spray adhesive just to spray it on the wood and then stick the foam on but because it's quite windy outside I don't want to use that today and I just want to get on with it so I'm just going to use the same thing I used to glue the wood before which is the aerodeck glue you so now I need to cut out some wadding to go over the top of the phone and the Ottoman so that the sides will be a little bit more soft rather than just having that fabric so this is my body I've already cut out my top panel I'm just going to do one layout on the top panel then I'm going to double it for all of the side panels that way it will be a little bit softer and a little bit more comfortable the tops already got foam so that's why we don't need it on the top now I've had sorry measure the height of the Ottoman because it's got that lump of foam on the top now so it's no longer just that 33 centimeter measurement that we allowed for it's also got a little bit extra for the pieces of wood that are at the top and the bottom those big panels and then it's also got that big chunk of foam so my new measurement is 44 centimeters high okay so we need to measure the height of the Ottoman and then we need to do the length so I'm gonna start with my shorter sides 60 centimeters long and 44 centimeters high I'm gonna add a little bit extra on to that because of sea lions so instead of making it 44 centimeters I like 1.5 teacher either side a little bit more so amazed and make it about 50 centimeters just to be on the safe side that's for my height because I want to be able to pull that that wadding around the bottom for my length I only want to add the seam allowance because I don't want it to be too long I want it to line up with the corners of the Ottoman so for that one instead of being 61.5 to each side which makes it 63 so we'll just mark that out and cut that out so now I've cut out four short pieces and four long pieces doubled them up so now I have two pairs of each size and I need to join them all together because they're going to go all the way around the ottoman so here I've got my really really long piece and I've got my short piece and I'm just going to join them together and now it's not vanilla I've got a long piece a short piece a long piece so now that those edges are all pinned together I can go ahead and slow down each of these sides remember we about 1.5 same islands so that's what we want to stitch down so now I've sewed all four of the side panels together and I need to attach my top panel that's going to go over the top of the phone so I've got my other panel here and I'm basically going to line up each of the corners with the seams before I am pinning this I did just check it quickly on the Ottoman to make sure it fits so make sure you do that as well on your one because you don't have to be too big if it is just already and on the seams a little bit more sides all the way around and just making sure so now I've sewn the top panel to the side panels and I'm just going to slip it straight over the top of the phone and wood making sure that the nice side is facing out at the scene now that the wedding has been placed over the top of the Ottoman we just need to staple it along the bottom edge so I flipped it upside down so this is the base of my Ottoman and I'm just going to start stapling but I'm going to staple along the side not along the bottom because we want to be able to staple the fabric to the bottom so we just staple it to the side and hopefully these other staples won't get in the way and then we'll cut off some of this excess you don't need to pull this super tight you want to make sure that it doesn't tear as you're working with it if you pull too tight you might rip it so make sure it's firm but don't tear it okay so this is the material that I'm going to use for my ultimate it's a lovely gray material I'm just working on the back of it here so what I need to do is cut out another basically the same set is what I cut out of the wedding so I'll need to cut out the top panel and then the four side panels that will all get sewn together and exactly the same way the only difference this time being that we're doing one single layer we're not double layering anything so first of all I will cut out to my top panel so knowing that that is a hundred by sixty centimetres I'm going to start marking that out and then adding that seam allowance as well so I'm going to do 63 centimetres so don't want to fight big pieces in one of my short pieces so now I've sewn all of the four seams that go down the corners of each side of the Ottoman and I just need to sew on that top panel so same thing as we did with the bottom we're just lining up those four corners with each of the C's so I'll quickly pin that on and then we can saw it and then we can attach it to the Ottoman so now stretch the fabric over the Ottoman and then I just poked my hand down each of the corners to make sure the seams were sitting out flat like this and now I need to staple it so as I staple I'm going to pull one side and then the opposite side then the other edge and then the opposite of that one as well and I'll work my way doing opposites the whole way around to make sure that when I pull it really tight I'm pulling it even so this is what the base of the Ottoman looks like with the fabric stapled on now just to cover up that I need to just cut another piece of black fabric I'm probably going to iron the the edges under just to make it a little bit neater and then I'll just staple that on you can use black staples if you want it to look a little bit neater but I'm just going to use silver because that's all I've got you