HOW WE MADE BOUCLE CHAIR COVERS – ORC WEEK 6

When the Ikea cabinet doors arrived damaged, I had to quickly pivot and change projects for the One Room Challenge this week, but I’m so excited to show you these boucle chair covers!!! We have the most comfortable dining chairs. So comfortable in fact, that when the faux leather started flaking off, we still didn’t want to get rid of them! Instead, we made these chair covers to brighten up the room and of course cover up the flaking!

So Let’s Take a Look at the Before

There are two chairs looking like this that need to be covered up. Two chair covers are made and I just haven’t decided whether to cover all the chairs or just these two and put them at each end of the table. I can’t show you a picture just yet as it would reveal the whole dining room and that can’t happen until the One Room Challenge reveal in two weeks time!

Step 1

Firstly, let me point out that my mother helped me hugely for this and basically did all the sewing!! While it’s a pretty easy project, you would have to be comfortable using a sewing machine. To begin with, we turned the material upside down and draped it over the chair. You can see we added a small fold where the back meets the seat. The fold is upside here because the material is back-to-front. Because where the back of the chair meets the seat is curved, a fold was the best way to hide any imperfections.

We pinned down each side, pulling the material slightly to make sure it was nice and snug. Using the sewing machine, we sewed down each side, until it just went past the fold. We left the top corner loose for the moment.

Step 2

After the sides were sewed, we sewed the rounded corners. There are a few different ways to sew corners, depending on the type of chair you have. For us, this was the best!

After the rounded corners were sewn, we cut off all the excess materials down both sides of the chair, leaving only 1cm from the sewn line.

Step 3

Finally, the material was turned the right way out. You can see below, the top half of the cover is quite snug. I didn’t want it loose or it would take away from the modern look of the chair. I then turned the chair upside-down and stapled the material on the bottom. Again, I made sure the material was pulled taut when stapling.

I’m so happy with the finished product, it turned out even nicer than I imagined!!! Here is the boucle fabric I used and the quality was really good. I’m going to spray the covers with Scothguard to protect them against staining…though let’s face it…they are white dining chair covers so they are absolutely going to get stained!! The best thing about these though is that it wouldn’t be very difficult to remove the staples and give them a wash! Would you give these boucle chair covers a go??

If it’s not your cup of tea, I found a few dining chair covers on Amazon here, here and here with really good reviews. These were my backups if the boucle project didn’t work out! This Irish website and so many good reviews too so I’d definitely recommend them too, especially their chair clips which would be very handy if you didn’t want to staple anything to the bottom of chair.

One Room Challenge

Only two weeks left until the reveal day for the One Room Challenge and there is soooo much to do! Hopefully my replacement cabinet door arrive on time so I can get that last big project ticked off the list next week. In case you missed them here are the last five weeks of projects:

• The dining room mood board
• Re-staining our dining table with Osmo Oil
• DIY radiator covers
• How to perfectly paint a wall
• DIY frame for any sized art

Stay tuned and don’t forget to check out the rest of the projects on the One Room Challenge blog!