Bowl Chair Repair

I have an old bowl chair that I got when I was about 12.  We bought it from Wegmans and I was very excited about it.  It has since traveled with me from apartment to apartment, partially because of its light weight for transport and partially because I didn't own much furniture.  About a year ago, my roommate's cat had trouble getting to its new litter box location and set up using my bowl chair instead.  Sadly, we didn't notice for a couple of days and try though I might, I could not get the thing clean through washing or scrubbing.  The pillow to my bowl chair has therefore been sitting unused in the corner, waiting to be fixed.



Well apparently with all of the excitement of moving DH in and setting up the apartment, yesterday was the day.  It took me about 7 hours, but I think a good 2-2.5 of those hours was spent standing in Joann Fabric trying to pick a material.  Does this happen to anyone else?? I really think that the hardest part of most of my projects is picking a pattern/yarn/fabric that I know I will be stuck with.  These were my top two choices:

After talking to DH, I ended up going with the more colorful fabric.  It is technically an outdoor fabric and I like the idea that if we ever have a porch, we might end up using it out there. There were other fabrics that I liked better but they were significantly more expensive for the volume of fabric that I needed.  This fabric was 54" wide and only $20 a yard (compared to a lot of the upholstery fabric selling for $35-$40).  It was on a 50% off sale and I used an extra 20% off student discount.  So it only ended up costing me about $28 for over 3 yards!

Rip the seam apart to separate the material.  

Place the two pieces of fabric down - right-side-together - and place the old piece on top as a template.  

Trace the outline, pin the pieces together and cut off the extra material in the corners.  Sew around your traced outline, leaving about a 10 inch gap.  

Pull the material through the gap so that the material is right-side out.  Ta-da!

Now for the long part.  Sort out all of the stuffing that is bad and throw it away.  Pull apart all of the good stuffing into small fluffy pieces and stick them inside of the pillow.  Add additional stuffing that I had lying around.  This part took about 2-3 times as long as the actual sewing but if you do not pull all of the stuffing apart it will be lumpy and uncomfortable.  Finally, fold the open ends in and CAREFULLY sew the pillow closed right along the outside edge.

The finished product:

So glad it's done! The pillow ended up a little larger than I expected but its very fluffy and I'm glad to have my reading chair back.  The original pillow had a bunch of spots where the pillow top and bottom were sewn together.  I haven't decided whether I want to add those to this pillow or not.