Here's a quick how-to. (Auntie Marie, stop reading now!)
As you can see, I sew like a monkey—or at least, like australopithecus. Which is why I'm in a position to give hope to all novice sewers.
I encourage you, reader, to make a chair cover or two just for the fun of it. It's so easy. So satisfying. So much better than a white chair with banana smeared all over it.
First, I started with a large quilt square, in the log cabin pattern, and four ties (I made the ties out of folded fabric). My quilt square was just a bit longer and wider than the seat of the chair.
The fabric is a mixture of new and old; strips of courderoy pants, muslin scarves, linen shirts, cotton dresses, and wool skirts. I did not measure, as measuring is overrated anyway. But you see how forgiving the log cabin pattern is?
Here's the back, so you can see how truly primitive it is.
To make the log cabin pattern, I started with the traditional red square (which, I'm told, is the "hearth" in the middle of the log cabin) then laid the strips round and round the square, sewing as I went.
I ironed both the quilt and the quilt back, which was a piece of canvas hacked down to size....
...all around the edge, like this:
and placed wrong sides together:
Then I placed the ties in the corners
and pinned them in place.
Then I top-sewed around the whole edge, et voila!
It looks all cute and mod, especially with a baby on it. And if any more dogs decide to recover from pup-birth on my chair, I can just toss it in the washing machine.
Not everything we make is an heirloom, and some pieces are meant to accumulate patches, get worn and used, and washed, and covered in banana, and washed again.
On a completely unrelated note, we have a pet baby squirrel. It's black and very skinny. Unfortunately I have no pictures until it can be persuaded to come out of its little nest of leaves in the box. It's a rescue squirrel. It fell off our porch roof and we saved it from Foszka, which completely spoiled her Mother's Day.
wow, that's how i sew :-)
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