Chair Project

So the next two posts are going to come pretty close together because I am going to post about two projects that I've done lately. Well one project and one food thing, but whatever.

So first this chair I covered. It was David's chair and I'm not entirely sure where he got it from but he had it long before we were married and if it wasn't such a good shape and the fact that we generally lack seating, we would have tossed it long ago. While I love pink, its just not something that goes so well with our other furniture. I had chosen some nice brown swirly fabric that would make it look a bit more fancy, matchy and hopefully last the next 3 decades.

So here is a picture of what it looked like before (minus the skirt that I took off before I realized that this was probably blog-worthy).

Chair: Before (sans skirt)

The skirt was hiding the surprisingly nice legs but taking it off was a bit of a chore because it involved taking out a million staples and anyone who knows us, know we don't really do tools. So I was using a butter knife and a screw driver. Luckily I had lots of episodes of Top Gear to watch so I didn't mind that it took a couple of hours.

After the chair was prepared. I needed to cut a pattern. Since I don't have any super handy AutoCAD or giant printers for making patterns, I just traced the shapes out on newspaper. In hindsight, I probably should have done a better job of tracings so that it was more accurate. But I'm not the most accurate pattern maker/cutter and usually make up for it with sewing skills (not so much this time).

So I cut out my fabric and then pinned all the pieces together onto the chair:

Chair: Pinning Stage

This part was actually not that hard. Probably because I had no idea what I was doing and could blissfully pin along. While I was definitely starting to see where the "measure twice, cut once" adage was coming into play, I thought things were going pretty well. Then I tried to sew everything.

Sewing was a nightmare. First it took forever (like 4 or 5 episodes of Top Gear) and things weren't lining up as well as I hoped. Plus joining 4 different pieces at one point, all at different angles, required more patience than I had. At this point, I decide to start cutting losses because even a sort of good chair cover would be better than the pink. Once everything had been mostly sewn I put it on the chair--there were lots of holes where the seams did not match.

I quickly lost interest in the project. Saturdays would pass and I would make almost no progress but David was encouraging and I'd sit on the floor of our living room watching shows with him and hand stitching all the holes closed. This worked out better than forcing it through the machine because I got to see on the right side how it would look.

I then recovered the cushion and maybe should have replaced the foam (considering large portions of it were a strange yellow dust), but crammed it into the cushion form and sewed it shut. It's a bit small but is more compact and pretty comfy.

And now it's done:

Finished project (with the help of Instagram)

I think it looks way better, even if its not perfect. The top and back of the chair turned out exactly how I wanted and probably with another few tries I could have figured out the arms. But at least it's covered and matches the rest of our living room.

Next I'll want to recover the pillows with this cute steel-blue bird print fabric, but the red pillow doesn't look too bad. I also have loads of brown fabric left over so on another ambitious day I think I might cover just the worn out cushions on our couch and chair. Then all the furniture would match! That would be nice.

For now I can say that I've covered a chair and I feel moderately proud of how it turned out. In dim lighting  it looks perfect.

Next...adventures in Quinoa.