Labor Day weekend was go weekend for reupholstering my desk chair. I've blogged previously about needing to add more foam to this old chair and the cover that was on the chair no longer fitting.
I had the fabric, I had my upholstery thread and needles, and I had advice from a woman I work with who actually took upholstery classes and redid more complex furniture than a desk chair. I steeled my nerves and set out to get it done.
I thought I had too much fabric and I should have ordered less, but after I laid out the old cover, drew a chalk line around it, and then drew a second chalk line about 6 inches out, I realized I did not have too much fabric. It's a good thing I ordered two yards.
I originally was going to use my rotary cutter, but when I saw how the fabric behaved to simply being unrolled, I opted for pinking shears instead to avoid fraying. I think this was the right decision and I'm happy I thought of it. I'm a new sewist and I've never done anything with upholstery fabrics before, so it was a learning experience.
I had a huge box of 100 clips. I used almost every one of them to clip around the circle of fabric before sewing. Curves are difficult for me to sew still and this massive thing is all curves.
I dug out the sewing machine and realized it had been so long since I'd used it that I'd forgotten how to wind the bobbin. I had to pull out the instruction book and curse my way through a few tries to get everything ready to go.
This seam is supposed to be wide enough to thread a wire through like I had on the previous chair cover. Now I need to execute this. Time to sew.
I didn't worry about top stitching because this part will be underneath the chair and no one will ever see it and it's easier for me to sew with the seam up than invisible to me. The woman at work who knows what she's doing said to go around twice, so I did. The second time was easier and I picked up the little areas where I missed fabric the first time.
Here's the fabric side of the seam. Now all I have to do is string the wire through and put it on the chair. It should be a piece of cake!
Spoiler alert: It was not a piece of cake. I needed to recover from this before I could revisit it in a blog post, hence the delay. Stayed tuned for Part Two of my chair adventures.
