Okay, so now it's official. Betty Jane's new flybridge cushions will appear in the Upgrade section of Power & Motoryacht's March issue. At the present moment, the folks at Jones Upholstery, a local place that does both marine, residential, and commercial upholstery repairs and replacements, is  most likely finishing off the project and tomorrow (Saturday) I hope to toodle on over to the marina in my Prius (redolent with the smell of fresh high-grade, heavy-duty marine vinyl) to try the cushions on for size, fit, and aesthetics. Exciting? Oh yeah!

If anything, the pricing of the whole deal was more surprising than anything else. While I'd expected to pay a thousand dollars or more, six brand-new cushions from Jones only cost me about $600, a sum I couldn't quite believe until I'd checked with other shops in Florida that proposed similar bottom lines. Gives me hope, actually. At some point, I'm planning to replace the fabric coverings on Betty's interior cushions and, from what I can tell (based on the cost of the exterior cushion replacement job), the blessings of affordability may waft down upon me in the next couple of years, not the next couple of decades.

The machine the Jones guy (shown above) is using is German, by the way, and very old. According to Randy Jones, Jones head honcho, such machines are rare these days and quite valuable. They offer higher levels of control and precision.

One other important thing I learned from Randy goes as follows. For some reason or other, I've been under the impression for years that marine-vinyl welting (a raised tubular-type edging on cushions and other upholstered articles) is a separately manufactured product that's typically marketed and sold to upholsterery shops for incorporation into new cushions and other products. While this is indeed the case with some upholsterers and manufacturers, Jones and others refuse to use pre-manufactured welting, choosing instead to make their own (as is illustrated in the photo below) on site.

Why?

"First of all: color," says Jones. "If you buy welting already made up it's quite likely that the color you get will not match the marine vinyl material you are using to make your cushions."

Then there's one other consideration--quality. According to Jones, if a shop creates its own welting using high-quality marine vinyl and UV-rated thread from an outfit like Glen Raven Mills (the folks who make Sunbrella canvas products), the shop knows what it's got in the end--a solid product that will nicely accentuate and strengthen a new cushion for many years into the future. Go with pre-fab welting, Jones adds,  and while the job may look decent initially and save a customer a few bucks, the end product is likely to look like a silk purse trimmed with a sow's ear as time wears inevitably on.