Another Chair Cover - Part One

This summer I made a cover for my office chair.  It's a slip-on piece for the back of the chair, and a mini-quilt for the seat.  I used a single piece of home dec fabric for the back and a complementary one for the seat.  Nice and durable, not much sewing.

Now I'm making a cover for the "office chair" in my sewing room.  This time I made life a little more difficult.

More difficult because I wanted to use fabric I already had.  The only home dec fabric I had was the poppy fabric.  That's going on the seat, which needs to be durable.

That means that the chair back will be made of regular cotton and needs to be pieced.  I used the poppies as the focus fabric when pulling from my stash.  Here everything is, all freshly laundered.

I wanted something nice looking for the chair back, so I'm using a pattern instead of just sewing a bunch of hunks of fabric together like I do sometimes.   I bought Pillow Pop in January, not with the intention of making pillows, but with the idea of sourcing them as quilt blocks.  I'm using the one on the left, Chevrons, by Brooke Biette, comprised of half-square triangles.  I like those things.

The only new fabric for this project is the neutral Nature Elements from Art Gallery.  I brought all my fabrics, including the poppy, to The Sewcial Lounge looking for a good neutral.  Sara had several options that would have worked, but this was the winner.

I did a little sketch of the pattern, then rearranged the fabric until I came up with an order I liked.  Brooke's version is scrappy - lots of variety in her HST.  I wanted something simpler, since the block is large enough to cover one side of the chair back.  Too much variety and you wouldn't see the pattern.

So I'm using just the one neutral, and each of the Vs will be just one fabric.  The top V will be lime, the next V is orange, etc.  My little cheat sheet also has the number of squares I need to cut from each fabric.

Lots of chain stitching.  I cut the lime ones apart with scissors, but the rest of them went much faster just zipping a rotary cutter between the two lines of stitching.  No need to use a ruler, since a straight stitching line is what matters.

After I cut them all apart, I thought the next step would be to arrange the squares according to the pattern, then sew.  Nope.  The next step said to trim to 3" so they'd be nice and square.  Ugh.

Ugh until I remembered my rotating cutting mat.  I lined the diagonal up with the 45-degree mark, and made sure the outer edges overlapped the 3" grid.

Then I trimmed one edge, rotated the mat 90 degrees and trimmed the next edge.  Round and round until it was perfectly square.  So as not to misalign the square when moving your ruler, it helps to hold the fabric on the left and slide the ruler off to the right.  If you lift the ruler up, the fabric wants to come up, too. 

For my cutting tool, I used my 6" long paper piecing ruler with the 1/4" beveled edge, only because it was the skinniest straight edge I could think of.  If you don't have one of those, you can use a plain old narrow school ruler.

One down, thirty five to go.  Maybe another day.