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Slight change of pace, but still fabric-oriented if not clothing. A while back I decided to cover my chairs and it was surprisingly easy and cost-effective and made a huge difference in the appearance of my living room so I wanted to share how I did it.
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The first step was to remove all the chair seats. You can see that they’re a bit dingy. (Yeah, that photo is a bit embarrassing. Honestly, we did clean them over the years, but they were 20 years old and at some point there’s just not much you can do. Hence this post.) Each cover had a non-woven sheet at the bottom that hid all the staples and attachment of the actual seat cover fabric. I gently removed one and used it as a pattern to make new ones. I used some poly brocade that was leftover from a costume because a) I had it and didn’t need to buy more, especially since this wouldn’t be visible and b) it matched nicely which is important to me even if it’s not visible.
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After cutting them all out, I serge the edges for a nice enough finish.
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Next I cut the actual covering fabric into a bunch of squares with a generous allowance so that I could pull it in. I aligned it on the fabric so that the diamonds were all going in the same direction. Then, I pulled it in and stapled the top and bottom at the center. Then the sides at the center and then worked my way out to the corners. I wish I had taken better pictures of this step to show you.
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After the edges were all pulled in, I trimmed them so there wasn’t a ton of extra fabric underneath. Then I laid one of the bottom covers on and stapled all around.
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And that was really about it. After that it was just a matter of putting the seats back on. They were only held in place by 3 screws, so this was a pretty easy task. Although admittedly I did strip one and the seat almost slid off a few weeks later, but that’s since been fixed so no worries if you’re over for dinner.
The whole thing took less than a day (not counting the fabric shopping) and it made such a huge difference in the overall feel of our dining area. Since we don’t have a real dining room, you can see how nicely it coordinates with the blue accent wall in our dining area and really warms it up.
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