Bar Stool Slip Cover

After hours of grueling research, I have chosen a fabric and made the first of three slip covers for the bar stools that sit between the kitchen and the den!  I shared this project with my Sewing for Your Home e-course this week, and am tickled pink at the way it turned out.

I had a selection of fabrics from which to choose, some that I loved more than others, and a couple that were clear front-runners.  They are all home dec-weight fabrics, since I want them to stand up to the abuse that a bar chair overlooking the main cooking area in our house is bound to get.  My husband had one favorite, so that’s what got picked.

These chairs are the Ikea Henricksdal, so lots of people had them.  We got the white covers for the two that were in my studio at the last house, and the leather covers for the two that were in our finished basement.  The leather ones are still downstairs, waiting for the basement to get finished at this new house, and the studio isn’t ready, so the studio chairs are going to live in the den from now on.  The white covers, though, were disgusting–I mean, really, just foul.

I don’t know how many of the stains you can see in that before, but they. are. there.  It looks so much nicer and fresher with the new color and the crisp, CLEAN fabric!

Plus, it really was simple to stitch up.  I cut apart the old cover to use as a template, since it clearly couldn’t be saved, and harvested the Velcro from that to use on this one.  From there, it was just a matter of copying what had already been done!  I skipped a lot of the reinforcing stitches that Ikea used on the original, which I might live to regret, but I kept the funny little hidden gusset they have in the back of the seat, to allow for human weight without stretching the fabric and stressing it too much.  And I’m pretty proud of how cleanly even the corners came together:

Using the existing slip cover as a template meant that the pieces all fit really well, and having the Velcro on the bottom helped snug everything up so that even the back is super smooth–which matters, since you see the full back from the den side of the bar.

I’m still working on my husband to see if I can convince him that not all the stools have to have the same fabric–and to let me cover one or two of the other ones (there are three total) in the fabric that was my favorite (and his least favorite, as luck would have it):

I really love the green he chose, and it was neck-and-neck with the zigzags as far as I was concerned, but the colors in this ikat match the colors in the Lizzie House fabric I picked for the curtains SO perfectly:

You’ll have to ignore the remnants of country blue in the background here and focus on the Lizzie fabric and the wall colors and how perfect the ikat zigzag stripe is with them both.  Here’s hoping he doesn’t hate the idea–I think it’ll add some enormous punch to this room, plus I have this sweet little candlestick side table that would be fabulous in that particular shade of mango-persimmon, and a great print with the same color in little lozenges on a cream background that wants very badly to be a floor pillow.  One project at a time, y’all!

When was the last time you had to make a color or fabric design decision with your spouse?  Do you go halvsies and each take turns, or what?  Because I think his exact words were, “I really don’t like THIS one,” which made me think there isn’t much hope…