DIY Recovered Office Chair

As you can see, me husband's office chair was looking a bit worse for wear. Since our second bedroom became a nursery, this chair now has to live in the Sitting Room and is the first thing you see as you enter the house. Needless to say I was not a happy 40 weeks pregnant bunny.

I looked on websites like Freecycle and Gumtree hoping vainly that someone would be getting rid of a Tweed office chair that would match our lovely herringbone Tweed sofa. No joy there, I turned to eBay, now willing to pay for a chair that would look like it belonged in my front room. Then I remembered...

About a year ago I found a huge, thick herringbone Tweed coat in a charity shop for only £8. It was a really simple shape, so only side seams and pockets to deal with, and there was metres and metres of fabric on this thing. I snapped it up. Over the months it was going to be a draft excluder, a set of cushions, a nicer coat... the list goes on. Where it actually ended up was in the loft, in a bag. Until today!

I started by removing the pockets.

There was slight difference in colour where the pocket had been but with the herringbone pattern it wasn't really obvious.

We dismantled the chair with relative ease and removed the cover material from the foam cushions. The cover wasn't stapled on; it had just been gathered and tied so we didn't even have to faff on removing previous staples or nails. Once we had all the pieces apart I lay out the coat and used the cover fabric as a pattern. 

There was no centre back seam on the coat, so we used the back panel for the seat cushion where a seam would have been a potential weak point over time. I pinned the cover to the coat and cut around it leaving a generous seam allowance that I knew I'd be trimming away later.

The next step was to stretch the Tweed over the cushion and staple it in place. This definitely needs two people two stop the material from moving. Some staples needed a tap with the hammer afterwards to make sure they were securely in place.

We tried to keep the bulk down on the corners by folding evenly before stapling. Then I trimmed off the excess and we screwed the plastic panel back on.

I was hoping this would be a no-sew project but there wasn't quite enough material to do the second cushion in one piece. Instead I made the back cushion in two halves using the two front panels of the coat and sewed a reinforced seam that would run down the centre of the chair.

sorry about the blurry photo!

 Same again, we stretched, stapled and trimmed. Then we reassembled the chair. All finished!

If you fancy giving this a go and want a more detailed step-by-step guide, we found this tutorial really helpful before starting our project.