Recovering seats is an easy, cheap alternative to buying brand new ones.

The holidays are coming. Maybe your family is, too. Maybe some friends. In any case, if you’re hosting a big meal this season, you’ll likely need a lot of seating.

Perhaps your dining chairs have seen better days. Or you had to pick up some at a garage sale that don’t match the others just so you would have enough.

There’s an easy fix for all of this, assuming you have the fairly standard wooden chairs with a removable seat: re-cover them.

A co-worker of mine asked me to make new covers for her kitchen stools out of scraps she had of other fabrics that coordinate with her décor. It was a fun challenge to work the small-ish scraps into pieces big enough to cover the whole seats, and I came up with a solution that both of us liked.

Supplies

• Paper
• Marker
• Ruler
• Fabric
• Scissors/rotary cutter
• Sewing machine
• Thread
• Iron
• Screwdriver or drill
• Staple gun and staples

Instructions

1. Measure the seats and trace the shape onto a large piece of paper. I used newspaper, of course. Keep the shape in mind when making the cover — on most chairs, one end is wider than the other. You’ll need to have sufficient fabric to wrap underneath on all sides.
2. Play with the scraps until you find a pattern that works. What I ended up with was not my original idea. For these, I cut the yellow floral scraps into strips and arranged them horizontally down the center and used the blue fabric vertically along the sides. The two seats aren’t exactly alike — the strips are arranged in different patterns — but the look is cohesive.
3. Sew the pieces together as you’ve arranged them, using a 1/4-inch seam. With the iron, press the seams to one side on the wrong side of the patchwork. They don’t all have to be pressed the same direction; usually you press them toward the darker fabric, if there is one.
4. Once the covers are ready to go, take the seat off the chair: Turn the chair upside down and take out the screws attaching the seat using a screwdriver or a drill with screwdriver bit.
5. Lay the cover right-side down on your work surface. Lay the seat right-side down on top of the cover. Carefully stretch the fabric around the seat. Staple once in the center of each side to hold the fabric; then go around the sides, stapling the fabric all around.
6. When finished stapling, put the chair upside down on top of the upside-down cover and screw the cover back on. Turn the chair right-side up and take a load off.

If you want to use just one piece of fabric for each cover rather than a patchwork piece: measure the seat and cut out the fabric, leaving overhang on all sides to attach it, then skip to Step 4.