Refresh (& Protect): Sewing Chair Covers

A while back, one of my cats adopted my sewing chair.  He proceeded to systematically love it to death, a.k.a. destroy it.

To protect my sewing seat, as well as its office twin, I  decided to make some chair covers.

Before:

After!

I didn't want to buy any fabric for the project, and luckily I found just over a yard of Sarah Jane's Out to Sea in my stash. This being Maine, some type of nautical decor is almost mandatory, and I love those pink boats ;)  For the backs of the covers, I used some tan solid I also had stashed.

Here's a rough outline of what I did. Perhaps these steps will help you make your own custom cat protectors chair covers!


First, I taped 4 sheets of scrap printer paper together and roughly traced the chair's bottom's shape. I folded the paper along the vertical midline, cut it out (folded, so that both sides would be symmetrical).  *Very technical*. I checked the resulting cutout, fiddled around with the shape a bit, and used it as a template for my fabric, cutting out a top and bottom fabric for the cushion. To make sure things stayed symmetrical, I aligned the fold of the template with a fold in the fabric.

I placed the top fabric on some scrap batting, pinned it, and trimmed the batting (unfortunately not pictured).  At this point, I quilted the two layers together, leaving out a few quilting lines unstitched on purpose.

After stitching and unpinning, I placed the bottom fabric on top of my quilted piece, with right sides facing together.

I also wanted to have a way to secure the covers, so I used twill tape to make ties. To finish the twill tape, I folded them a couple of times at one end and did some stitching to secure the edge.

I placed the twill tape pieces between the layers, with just a little unfinished tail sticking out of each.

I then pinned like crazy and  stitched around the perimeter, leaving an opening between the two rear ties to turn the cover...

...and made sure to backstitch over all of the ties.

After stitching, I trimmed all the edges to line up with the smallest piece of fabric (tan, in this case...I wasn't too fussy when cutting around my template, apparently), and carefully cut some little triangles out of the seam with scissors to help the curves lie flat after turning right side out.

After turning the cover right side out,

I did some topstitching along the edges, closed the opening, and added in the remaining quilting lines, which I thought would help the back fabric "stick," making this more like a mini quilt than a pillow case.

To make the cover for the chair back, I just modified the chair bottom template, since although they are similar in size, the back is a bit smaller and has a slightly different shape. All the other steps remained the same!

(He still likes it.)