Slipcovering the Chairs

Well, it is now September of 2023 and this project happened in January of 2022, so. . . bear with me while I try to remember what happened. 

I have a matched set of barrel style chairs in my living room. They're a sort of vaguely golden multicolored fabric that came from someone's office, I think? The fabric did not hold up well on the arms, but otherwise they're solid chairs. They just needed some love. 

I have generally ended up with a lot of hand-me-down everything, including these chairs, but that also included some pale pink cotton velvet curtains (the ones from Ikea, if you've ever looked at Ikea curtains). I didn't particularly want pale pink chairs, but I had a lot of the fabric and it seemed like it would make pretty good slipcovers. I decided I'd overdye the fabric, aiming for a deep raspberry. 

The fabric waiting to go into the dye bath

The fabric after the dye bath

I got the fabric dyed and then I stalled out. Luckily, my parents were on their way (have you noticed a theme in how my projects get done??), and my mom offered to help out. I didn't want the sort of loose and drapey styled slip covers; I wanted fitted slip-covers, so we opted to piece the slipcovers, including using zippers and putting darts in to get the backs to follow the curve of the chair. We basically fitted them inside out, and then did finishing touches using a LOT of hand-sewing when turned right-side out. 

It was at this point that I discovered that I didn't actually like the color I'd landed on, and we did some last minute additionally dying, which led to another problem. I overdyed the slipcovers and (for some unknown reason; probably related to the time of night), I did not overdye any of the extra fabric. So naturally, we ran out of fabric without getting the seat cushions covered (oops) and someday I'll put a contrast cover on those as well. 

Look at how neatly those backs curve!

For a few months, I had beautiful, rust colored chairs. 

I did not at all think about the strength of the NM sun and my complete inability to draw my curtains ever. Within about 4 months the slipcovers were pretty visibly sun-struck, which is one of the difficulties with overdying - vibrancy can be tricky especially with sun. Instead of a pretty rusty red, my chairs (20-ish months later) are more of a pumpkin color. I'm not mad at the color, honestly, and it seems to have stabilized pretty well. But they are definitely not the color I intended them to be!