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[HotRodJpod]

I am in the process of building a poker table, which I will be padding the top rail for the comfort of the players. I have done this several times over the years by simply adding the 1" foam padding to the plywood substrate. Then I would use a full piece of marine vinyl to tack around the outside nipping and pulling as needed to smooth out the outside edge. Then I would turn my attention to the inside of the rail, again pulling and tacking along until it too was tacked in and smoothed around. There is no issue with this method, and I could easily do it again, if not for one want of mine. I REALLY would like to ultimately upholster it with leather as that is far nicer to rest your arms on than vinyl when we are playing for many hours. But as you can imagine it is unlikely I would find a piece of leather that is 4’x8’ to get the job done. I figured to do this, I would start again with marine vinyl, as it is a cheap way to practice, and once I have a dialed in the pattern I could use that to do the leather when I had time.

The issue at hand is making a pattern to sew together 8 separate pieces, 4 rectangles that go along the flat sides of the oval, and 4 90-degree turns at the ends of the table. The rectangles are pretty simple, account for seam allowance, and enough overhang on the inside and outside to tack in place. Where I am running into a bit of a struggle is with the curves. It doesn't feel like I should be simply making a 1/4 circle with perfect 90 degree edges that will meet up with the rectangles. While I can probably get away with this when using marine vinyl as it is a bit stretchy across the weft, when I ultimately get to leather I am not going to have near as much forgiveness and will need a proper pattern. It seems to me that the pattern will need some sort of bend/curve that will assist in the compound curve on the inside.

I am including a couple of diagrams so you can see exactly what I am talking about to help make sense of this. The first diagram is a picture to show the rail and how the segments will fall across it. The second diagram is a cross-section of the rail showing the padding and the fabric (terribly drawn in red) and how it wraps around from the bottom over the padding and to the bottom on the other side.

Any assistance from the group is greatly appreciated.

[Adam12]

I'd use patterning plastic...clear shrink wrap, 6mil painter's plastic or the like. Mark your table the same way your diagram is marked then lay, glue, pin and/or tape the plastic on it to draw your pattern sections that way. You can then make a set out of vinyl first to see how well your patterns worked out.