Two ways to recover a desk chair
the casing I’d just sewn. When I got back to the beginning, I tugged hard on both ends of the elastic to make the oval scrunch up a little — looking sort of like a shower cap or a drawstring bag.
Then I slipped the cover over the seat of my desk chair and tugged harder on both ends of the elastic, fitting the cover around the seat. When I was happy with how snug it was, I just knotted the ends of the elastic together. There was no need to sew up that 5cm gap since it was on the underside and no one would see it.
THE PIN
Now, I could have used the same method to make a slipcover for the back of my desk chair, but it would have left the tight elastic circle visible on the back of my chair. Instead, I decided to make a snug slip-on cover that would basically be the equivalent of yanking a pencil skirt over the back of a chair.
I didn’t have a ton of fabric left, but I had two pieces large enough to cover both sides of the chair back. With both pieces “right sides in” (meaning you couldn’t see the pretty rainbow stripes) against the chair back, I pinned them together all along the top and down both sides, making sure the fabric was stretched nice and tight.
Once the last pin was in place, I carefully pulled the whole thing off and took it over to the sewing machine to sew along the pin lines. When I was finished, I had a wobbly-looking U-shaped seam connecting both pieces of fabric.
It didn’t look perfect by any means, but that’s the beauty of stretchy fabric! I trimmed away the excess fabric around the edges, squared up the bottom, flipped it right-side-out and yanked it over the back of my chair. A perfect fit, and the entire project took me less than an hour!
My new pink keyboard was already making me smile at work, and now my new rainbow desk chair is proudly drawn up in front of it. If the slipcovers get dirty or damaged, they’ll be easy to remove. Heck, I might make a few other sets and change up the decor of my office a few times a year. Maybe the next set will match my llama-printed calculator.