This chair presented a challenge. My client wanted a slipcover but didn't want the wood covered. Normally when slipcovering something that has wood, you just kind of pretend it isn't there and cover it as if the entire piece was upholstered. In this case, though, she wanted all of the wood showing. She also had only a small piece of fabric she purchased in Paris.
As I've said before, I cut with the fabric on the actual furniture in your house. Again, this was an exception to that general rule because I had to figure out how to do this while doing it. The usual way to do a slipcover like this would be to have ties for closure. In this case, the only way I thought it would look good was to use snaps. So I took the chair home with me and the fun began...
I did tabs with snaps through the wooden scroll work.
The full view of the finished chair. Not bad, if I do say so myself! I was very happy with how it turned out, as was my client.
Just imagine this chair with ties instead of snaps. I think I used about 50 snaps in total, which means I would have needed the same number of ties. Not only did I not have enough fabric for that many ties, the chair would have looked ridiculous. Although it was somewhat time-consuming to sew on that many snaps, it would have taken far longer to make 50 pairs of ties. The style of the chair dictated how to do the cover.
You can kind of see the snaps at the sides. I did covered button tabs to keep the front side and back side together.
Sometimes seemingly 'unslipcoverable' pieces actually can be transformed with a little imagination and work.
