A friend of the family gave me this chair when I got my own place. He wanted to get rid of it and I was on a tight budget with having to redo pretty much everything in the foreclosure I purchased. It went well in our living room in the townhouse but after moving into our new home and moving it into our guest room it no longer matched the decor.
I was bound and determined to figure out a way to recover it myself, knowing how expensive it can be to have it professionally done. I scoured pinterest for ways to recover chairs. Everything I read said to remove the staples, take off the fabric to use to templates for the new fabric, replace all of the stuffing, etc. That seemed more complicated then what I wanted to do but thankfully creativity struck one day (off from work).
I am a procrastinator at heart so it didn't take long to decide to put aside my wifely chores to work on the chair. Here is what I used for the chair: 2 fabric shower curtains, scissors, 6 buttons, thread, a staple gun and about a million straight pins. Would you have every guessed that this beautiful chair is held together by straight pins? LOL I promise you can sit in it without getting poked!
I started by tucking the fabric around the backrest of the chair, letting the material hang down the back, and making sure the pattern was positioned the way I wanted on the front. There is quite a bit of space between the backrest, arms, and seat. I trimmed any excess fabric to save for other parts of the chair. Because the corners are curved the fabric hung down the back with a slight overlap, which I used to my advantage. I pinned the fabric into the back of the chair with the overlapping fabric covering the pins. Using the staple gun, I stapled the fabric to the bottom of the chair to keep the fabric taught across the back of the chair.
The arms were a bit tricky to figure out. I used the smallest scraps that I could and covered the front of the arms first. For this part it doesn't matter where the pins go in the arms because there will be additional fabric to cover the tops of the arms. The second part of the arms is the top, including the sides. I took advantage of the finished edges that the shower curtain fabric already had and used that area to go around the outside of the arms you see. The material that goes on the sides is also pinned in the back of the chair behind the overlap to hold it in place. I came up with a technique to hide the pins under the fabric in the front of the arms. Start the pin under the fabric, go through the fabric a bit, and then into the chair. This was done anywhere the pins were hidden (the back of the chair and the front curved areas of the arms). The fabric was tucked in place on the sides of the arms with a few pins placed to make sure everything stays in place (the pins where placed below where the cushion sits so that they don't show. I also used the staple gun to get a fitted look right under where the arm curve ends and the side of the chair begins. Again the fabric was stapled to the bottom of the chair.
The front of the chair was pinned in place on top (far enough back so that the cushion covers the pin heads) and stapled on the bottom.
Now for the cushion itself. The second shower curtain is primarily just for the cushion. I placed the cushion in the middle of the fabric, on the wrong side and wrapped it like a present. The pins were placed on the bottom of the cushion and inserted at an angle to ensure that when sitting in the chair nothing will poke through. I wrapped the cushion so that the button holes (originally for the shower curtain hooks) where placed from the top on the front of the cushion. I bought coordinating buttons and sewed them to hold everything in place and give the chair a bit of personality!
I love the way I did this because if I ever decide that I want that I want the chair back the way it was all I have to do is remove the pins!
Before: Looking for a picture of the chair before the makeover. I was so excited about redoing it I forgot to take a before picture!
After:
