Parsons Chair Recovering

Parsons Chairs then. I didn’t even know I had Parsons Chairs, I thought I just had chairs.
I have two of them, about 10 years old I expect and a little grubby (IKEA again, naturally, what young thrusting executive doesn’t get all their dining room furniture from there?), this would be a trickier thing than recovering a seat base, as it would actually involve sewing!

Back to John Lewis for more fabric. This time it was some creamy brown stuff with a leaf of some kind on it, £15 a metre, bargain.

A chair, the day before yesterday

Said grubby chair before I started.

Looking at it, it didn’t seem too difficult, I wouldn’t even need to bother with a google search on how to do it, would I?

Turns out the seat was remarkably simple. I cut out some fabric, enough to cover the base, laid it on the seat upside down and pushed a load of it into the pocket at the back of the seat base. A couple of pins in the two front corners and off to the sewing machine I went.

The machine is a Singer 533

This isn’t my one, I stole this pic off the internet, sorry internet

Luckily I hadn’t touched any settings since I picked it up from my parents, and it still seemed to be set to do a straight bog-standard stitch. A quick youtube guide on how to thread it (way too complex, who designed these things?) and away I went.

I sewed (is that even the correct term?) a straight stitch across each corner, about a centimetre away from the pins, then took the pins out and used the first stitch line as a line to follow to sew where the pins used to be. I probably could have just drawn a line or something and followed that, but 2 rows of stitching has got to be better than one, right? I’ll remember the drawing thing for next time.

Did t’other side the same and turned it inside and and put it on the seat base. A few staples underneath to fix it all up and voila!

Base done, that was easy

Blimey, that actually looks ok.

My first seam!

Next was the back, a bit more tricky that.
I cut out the front and back pieces, with loads of extra on the edges for when I screwed up. Pinned the back onto the front as tight as I could get it, which involved a fair amount of pinning, then re-pinning bits I had already pinned as I kept going around.
Slipped that off the chair, back to the machine and did the same technique as last time. A guiding stitch outside where I wanted, and another stitch on the pin line. Quite tricky to work with the fabric as I needed to have the front as kind of a large “pocket” rather than just laid flat. Also very tricky due to the sewing machine snapping thread, or not sewing a tight stitch, or not catching the bobbin thread, or a million other problems that i’m sure all beginners have.
A few unpicking and restitching later and this was the result

A bit wonky

Not the straightest seams in the world, but a reasonable fit. I’m sure there is a better way to do the top corners, but I have no idea about that 🙂

A bit of trimming at the bottom and more stapling and this is the finished result

Done!

Not too bad at all, total time taken was about 4 hours I expect. The next one was quicker, about 2 hours I think.

The cloning process was a success…

Compare the finishing of the first chair

to the second chair

I even had enough fabric left to knock up a couple of envelope cushions, by following this pattern
http://www.housetohome.co.uk/articles/how-to-make-an-envelope-cushion-cushions_474716.html

Cushions, one pair of

And a table runner, which it is surprisingly difficult to sew a straight 1.5m stitch.
It was during the table runner that my sewing machine died 😦 A combination of being 30+ years old and not serviced for at least 25 of those, meant that it got slower and slower and eventually stopped. A new machine beckons before the next task.

Ties!

Wish me luck.