Overly Ambitious

A couple of weeks ago, for no apparent reason, I got really ambitious and straight up reupholstered a whole chair.  Seriously.

As soon I saw the Aviary fabric by Thomas Paul several months back, I was enamored.

Source: Thomas Paul

After thinking on it for awhile, I bought 3 yards in yellow with the intention of one day building up the courage to try my hand at recovering our Ikea Tullsta chair.

For some unknown reason, I built that courage up about 5 years sooner than I had anticipated and dove right in one Saturday morning. 

Because the fabric was was definitely an investment, I wanted to make sure I did it right the first time, so I began by making a pattern out of some extra fabric I had around.  In order to make the pattern pieces, I pinned the fabric to the chair so that I could mark the seams in the chair's covering.

Once I had made the seam markings and cut the pieces out with seam allowances, I pinned them together for a test run on the chair. 

Once I was satisfied with how my test run fit, I dove right in and cut the pieces out of the Aviary fabric, paying attention to the placement of the fabric pattern on each piece of the chair covering.

After sewing together the pieces for the inside and the outside of the chair, I fit them on the chair wrong side out so that I could pin them together to achieve a tight covering.

Once the cover was made, I pulled it tight and stapled it to the bottom.  I did struggle with getting it to stay tight in the seat.  As far as I could tell, there was no solid surface in the seat of the chair for the staples to grab onto, so the staples came right out when I tried to get a tight fit.  Although I haven't photographed it (perhaps out of shame), I ended up using curved quilting pins to tightly secure the covering to the existing cover.  I was able to get away with this solution because the chair's removable cushion covers all of this up. 

Once I had made the cushion cover, the chair was complete, and it was B-E-A-U-T-I-F-U-L (at least to me!)!   My back has been hurting for weeks since undertaking this project, but I'm more than happy with the result.  Fingers crossed that it holds up over time...

I think Pete likes it, too...