Reupholstered Folding Chair

In my bedroom at home, I have a folding circle chair to curl up in while reading books. And I've always wanted a comfy chair in my dorm room to lounge around on and for friends to sit in when they come over, but I have never had enough space. One of the disadvantages of having a roommate I believe. But this year I live in a single, which means I have a regular sized room all to myself! So much room for activities!

So when packing for school this summer, I grabbed my circle chair to add it to my stuff. But then I noticed that the bottom of the chair cushion was completely shredded. Presumably by tiny foster kitten claws from the previous summer. The seat of my poor chair was in no shape to be manhandled by drunken nights and rough friends. At least, not without some extra fabric support. Thus began my first foray into re-upholstery. Unfortunately, I didn't think to take pictures during this project. I only have one in-progress picture.

This is the style of chair that I began with.

To remove the chair cushion from the frame, I had to literally cut it off. Which meant that I had to brainstorm a new way to reconnect the cushion when the job was finished. After cutting the cushion off, my next step was to cut it apart along its seams. This provided me with templates for cutting its new cover from other fabric. The fabric that I chose to be the new cover was actually a blanket. My freshman year I bought this luxuriously soft zebra print faux fur throw from Target. I loved that thing. Until the day I put it in the dryer for too long and it got burnt a little. After that it wasn't that super soft anymore and random patches of the faux fur felt kind of rough even. After the dryer incident, my blanket spent most of its time stuffed in a duffle bag under my bed. But now it could have a second chance at decorating my room!

The blanket consisted of a zebra print panel and a solid black panel sewn together. I ripped out one of the seams and flipped the blanket inside out. Next, I arranged the old cushion pieces on the blanket, pinned them down, and cut the new cushion pieces out. Here is the only picture I have from this process.

After cutting them out, I turned the pieces around so the faux fur side was facing outward with the old cushion pieces pinned in between the faux fur layers. I wanted to reuse the padding from the original cushion for inside of the new cushion so I just used sewed the old cushion inside the new faux fur pieces. After stitching the old cushions inside their new faux fur covers, I reconnected the chair cushion pieces at the original seams that I had separated them at in the beginning. Now I had a new zebra print faux fur circle chair cushion! But I still needed to figure out how to reattach the cushion to the seat frame. It had originally been sewn onto the frame and I had cut it off. I remembered how the cushions for our patio furniture just tie on to the frames, so I decided to try that with this chair. I collected a bunch of black shoe strings and cut them into 8 inch lengths. Then I handstitched them all along the outer edge of the circle cushion. The last thing to do was to tie the chair on to the frame and then admire my first attempt at reupholstery. I love my new zebra print faux fur chair. And now, instead of never using my once favorite blanket or my kitten-destroyed circle chair again, they, together, get used every day.

The floor poof in this picture is another project that I made. I'll show a tutorial for it soon.

Meow