How To Make Chair Covers

Making a chair cover is a seemingly complicated process, but if one reads the instructions carefully and is armed with patience, an amateur designer can easily do this task. The success of the project is fully dependant on a chair’s complexity and the details of the chair cover you choose to make. Start with a simple design chair and inexpensive fabric material. Let’s have a look at this step-by-step DIY tutorial for making a chair cover for a square backed chair.

Make The Measurements

For a square back chair cover you need to measure:

• The length of the back of the chair from the top to the floor;
• The length of the chair’s back;
• The seat depth;
• The widest point of the chair seat (in our example it’s equal to the width of the back of the chair);
• The chair legs’ height.

Make The Pattern

Before you cut all of your pieces, we strongly recommend you’d do a sketch design.

Our chair cover design pattern has only three pieces: a long rectangular piece that covers the back, the seat, and the front to the floor, and two rectangular side pieces that cover the chair from the seat to the floor.

The width of the long rectangular piece equals the width of the chair with two additional centimetres added to each side.

The length of the large rectangular piece is calculated by adding the length of the back of the chair from top to the floor, the length of the face of the chair, the depth of the seat and the height of the chair legs. Add 1.5 centimetres to each side.

Cutting Out The Pieces

Our chair cover model is pretty simple so you can skip this part where you make the paper pattern and try it first on the chair. You can get down to cutting out the fabric pieces consulting the sketch design.

You can use chalk to draw on the fabric, optionally a piece of soap or a pencil. A ruler is best for the fabric pattern making as all our pieces have straight sides.

Sewing The Pieces Together

When all the pieces are cut out you can start sewing them up.

The steps are:

1. Make the seam allowance on the side edges of the back piece;
2. Turn up and stitch the side and bottom hems of the back piece;
3. Stitch together the side pieces and the seat;
4. Turn up and stitch the side and bottom hems of the side pieces and the front piece;
5. Use the overlocker sewing machine to trim the inseams and hems (overlocker sewing machine is used for enclosing the edge of the fabric inside the thread).