My sister-in-law and I went to a upholstery fabric clearance place last March (!!) and I bought fabric to make a slipcover for a channel-backed wing chair that came from Jerry’s grandmother’s home. It needs to be totally rebuilt and redone (it’s threadbare in places, shredded and falling apart in others), but we don’t have the funding to do something like that right now, and besides, we need to really wait until the cats die (they have claws) and the children are beyond the color-on-furniture stage before we reupholster something properly.
Well, Monday as we were doing birthday stuff, I realized that chunks of stuffing from the front corner of that chair were on the floor in the living room, either from the cats clawing it or Alice picking at the open wound on the chair. So I got out the roll of upholstery fabric, my pins, and made a slipcover for it. It’s somewhat ill-fitting, since I wasn’t consistent with my pin placement (inside of the arm on this side, outside of the arm on that side), but it’ll do as a protective covering for a while. And it looks better than the shredding chair, honestly. (And finally I can throw away the hideous embroidered wedding afghan that someone gave us as a wedding gift… complete with Jerry’s first name — which he doesn’t go by — and my name… So it always looks weird to see our names like that since I’ve never called Jerry that name except during the wedding vows… That wedding afghan has been doing a sorry job of protecting the top half of the chair for about 6 years — with the names on the backside. LOL)
It took me probably a total of 2 hours to make the stupid thing. WHYYYYYY did I procrastinate for almost a year and a half before DOING it?!
Annoys me. But at least I don’t feel like that money was wasted now. Here’s Alice modeling it for your viewing pleasure…
I did it the way I’ve seen them do on Trading Spaces for years…. Pinned the fabric on inside out (I overlapped two pieces in the back so that there’d be an opening — with the big wings on the sides I knew that there was NO WAY I’d be able to get the slipcover on and off if I tried to make it in one piece), very close to the chair, and then took it off the chair and sewed along the pin lines with my sewing machine (heavy polyester thread, jeans needle, two rows of stitching with a small stitch length for extra durability). The slipcover is in three pieces — front/base (under cushion), left side to center back, and right side to center back. The cushion is covered separately (a fourth piece) and I wrapped that one like a present and just whipstitched it on with a needle and thread by hand. I had almost exactly the perfect amount of fabric — maybe about 12″ extra. I have no idea how I calculated that, but YAY!
Once I had all of the machine stitching done, I came back downstairs and put it on the chair again, and whipstitched the back opening closed (turning over the edges so there are no raw edges exposed back there). So the slipcover is sewn onto the chair at this point and won’t come off unless I clip all of those stitches.
Yesterday I went to Wal-Mart to get some T-pins so that I can finish the bottom. I don’t really want there to be a “skirt,” so I’m going to trim and pin the bottom edges to the bottom of the chair.
It’s not perfect, but it’s a LOT better than it was because the kids and the cats don’t have access to the parts that are so damaged. Even ill-fitting, it looks much better than it did, and doesn’t look like a garage sale find anymore. And when our kids have grown up a bit and our cats have left us, we’ll have the chair rebuilt.