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It is finished! I finished the Hideous Chair Project yesterday afternoon while Tater Tot slept and it is so cute! It’s pink and purple and soft and fuzzy. Well, let me quit describing it and get on with the before and after pics!

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Before: really “interesting” gold and beige velvet upholstery! But it’s low and looks like it has potential for a really cute reading chair for Tater’s room. And it’s only $5! Can’t beat that…

Click to make me bigger!
After: Cute, pink/purple, soft, fuzzy Big Girl Chair that Tater Tot loves! She really likes how soft it is and that it’s a little lower to the ground than the adult-sized recliner we had in there before.

Let me tell you a little bit about what this project entailed in case you think you want to tackle something like this for your child’s room. It wasn’t that hard, really.

Materials List:

* 5 yards of $1 a yard fabric to make a “pattern” for the slip cover (this is optional but a good idea if you don’t know what you’re doing like I didn’t!)

* 5 yards of whatever fabric you’d like to use to make the slip cover. I used what JOANN’S calls “cuddle” fleece which is a fuzzier, stretchier fleece than what you normally think of when you think of fleece. I bought it on sale for $2 a yard! I bought 4 yards and then remembered that I needed 5 after I was already home. Typical for me. It turns out that I had bought the exact same material in pink on sale last Fall so that’s where the two-toned idea came from. I would recommend a thick fabric with some stretch, depending on the lines of your chair. This chair needed a little stretch to get the slip cover over it.

* Thread to match the fabric for the slip cover.

* Hideous Garage Sale/Thrift Store/Free chair

I think that’s it. Oh! A sewing machine, of course. Nothing fancy. I just have a basic model.

I started by tracing the shapes of the existing upholstery. It had seams where the panels were sewn together so it was easy to just follow how the original upholstery was put together. I added an inch seam allowance to the pattern before I cut it out just to be safe.

Then I pinned the pattern to the slip cover material and cut it out. Easy.

Actually getting the slip cover to be fitted was a teeny tricky but the best way I found was to turn the pattern pieces wrong side up and place them on the chair and pin them together. If you’ve ever watched “Trading Spaces” you’ll know what I’m talking about. I went slowly and only pinned a couple of pieces together at a time. Which ones you start with will really depend on the lines of your chair.

I sewed a few pieces together, rechecked the fit with the above wrong-side-up method and then went on to the next pieces until the basic slip cover was done. I chose to slip cover only the chair part and to recover the cushions because it was just easier.

The idea of the ruffle at the bottom occurred to me because I didn’t think I could pull off a pleated hem and I thought that I was a good enough seamstress to make it look good to just continue the slip cover to the ground. The ruffle really makes it easy to hide any lack of skill in the sewing area, I’ve found!

How to do the ruffle: Measure around the bottom of the chair and then double the number. Measure from the bottom of the chair to the ground and add two inches (one inch on top and one on bottom for seam allowance). Cut a piece of material as long as the doubled number and as wide as the other measurement. Baste 1/2 inch from the edge down one side of the piece. If you’re new to basting, set your sewing machine to the longest stitch possible and sew away! Pull one of the threads at the end to create the ruffle to the desired “ruffled-ness” and pin to the bottom of the slip cover, right sides together. Sew.

For the seat cushion, I made the pattern like I did the other pieces of the slip cover by tracing the shape and adding an inch seam allowance. Cut two of these, one for the top and one for the bottom. Depending on the shape of your cushion, you may have to do something different than I did for the middle of the cushion. I ended up cutting several pieces based on the shape of the cushion, doing the wrong-side-up pinning method to get the fit right and then sewing it to the top. To sew the middle to the bottom, I machine sewed it as far as I could while still being able to fit the cushion in. After inserting the cushion, I hand-sewed the rest. It doesn’t have to be neat because it’s on the bottom and nobody will see it!

For the back cushion, I pinned the material tight around it (with the right side of the material touching the cushion) and cut the material around the pins one inch out for seam allowance. Create a small ruffle like you did the large ruffle. Unpin the pieces of material for the cushion and pin the ruffle on the inside. Machine stitch as far as you can and still be able to fit the cushion inside. Hand stitch the rest.

And that’s it! It sounds like a lot but, if you do it in bits and pieces like I did, it’s actually fun and you kind of lose track of how much it really is!

Now it’s time to rest for a couple of days before I start the next project!