DIY: Up-Cycled Upholstered Vanity Chair - Finger knitted back

So for those of you who remember, in April, I decided to upholster an old Ikea chair that my parents had at our old house. When we moved, I wanted a chair to match my bedroom, but nothing I could find matched the colour palette I chose for my bedroom. I decided I'd upholster a chair! So here it is, my tutorial on upcycling a 10 year old Ikea chair.

To be further noted, I apologize for the picture quality, this was all taken on my iPhone 3GS back in April because I had no intention of blogging the process. Most of these pictures have instagram filters as well if you are questioning the colour consistency.

Materials:

Chair

Upholstery Fabric of your choice

Yarn - about 6 150g skeins of yarn. If you decide to use three colours the way I did, get two skeins for each colour

Hammer

Quilt Batting (optional)

Scissors

Plain, white flannel

Fabric/Sewing Pins (A LOT!)

1.5 inch Foam - buy as much as you need, go to your local fabric store to purchase it by the meter.

Staple Gun

Staple Gun Staples - make sure that the staples you use coordinate with your staple gun, and make sure the size makes sense with what you're doing. If you're using thicker foam, use a thicker staple size. My staple gun required T50 series staples and I ended up grabbing 1/2 inch AND 3/8 inch staples.

The first thing you'll want to do is finger knit! You can google or youtube a finger knitting tutorial online because that's a process separate to the tutorial I'm demonstrating here.

Anyway, make sure you have enough for the back of your chair, or for however much of the chair you wish to upholster with it.

Once you've finger knitted a sufficient amount, close off the stitch and put it aside for now.

Next you'll need the chair, the foam, scissors, the staple gun and staples, and a hammer.

Cut the foam so that its edges exceed about 4 inches over each side of the chair. Pull tightly on each edge and staple to the back and bottom of the chair so that it looks like what I've done in the picture. Continue this process throughout.

Next, you'll need the plain white flannel. Keep in mind that you don't need white, you can use whatever colour you want for the underlay fabric of the finger knitted portion. Upholster the fabric to the chair back tightly so as to completely avoid folds and wrinkles in the fabric.

Take your strands of finger knitted yarn, and begin pinning them to the chair in whatever pattern you choose. Customize your design any way you like, but be sure to pin it back far enough that the edges of the flannel is unseen.

As you go up, you're going to need to staple the knitted yarn to the back of the chair as well. I sewed mine in by hand, but I don't advise that unless you want to have bloody hands for a while.

It should look something like this, make sure to lightly pull on the strands to see if they're tight enough, if anything comes loose, just make sure to staple it tightly.

Use the upholstery fabric of your choice, for myself, I used left over fabric from the throw pillow cases I made for my bed. This particular fabric is a light blue bridal satin, that being said it's slightly pricier for a plain fabric that you could easily purchase for half the rate per meter. 

Upholster this fabric to the seat of the chair. Pull tightly when stapling the fabric to ensure a smooth seat.

TIP For a more comfortable seat from the previously wooden surface, upholster the fabric WITH the cotton quilt batting. It makes a significant different if you're all about ass-savvy comfort

If you're anything like me, you'll find a way to make this work with the room that you're putting this piece of upcycled furniture in. It looks really good with my room as a whole but in this particular picture, that's hard to tell.

And that's how you upholster a plain, 10 year old IKEA chair.

ENJOY :)

DIY: Patchwork Denim Pillow Case

My best friend of all time, Kaitlyn, moved to Ottawa this year for school and as a going away present, I thought it would be cute to do something sentimental like this. These are actually scraps from our OWN denim jeans that we ripped up to do the DIY Tie Bleach tutorial. 

Materials:

Sewing Machine

Thread

Assorted Denim

Fabric Ribbon

Lace

White studded fleece fabric

Pillow Insert

Sewing Machine - be mindful that you're sewing thick material, use a canvas/denim needle, preferably a 16/100 guage medium-to-heavy-weight needle (regular point).

Also be mindful to use extra strength durability thread. 

Cut your assorted denim into square patches, sizes and dimensions may vary.

Sew them in an entirely random pattern

Make it big enough to form one side of the pillow like this. 

Given the dimensions of the pillow insert, make sure the sheet is at least two inches wider on each side.

So now you have one side.

Using the back fabric - I just used left over cream coloured fabric for the back- Sew the two pieces of fabric together and put the pillow insert inside, sewing it shut.

Hopefully it fits as well as mine did!

Now it's time for the embellishments.

I used lace and fabric ribbon to make ...well.. lacy ribbon?

Align them and sew them together

You'll get something shnazzy like this. Bear in mind that you're not limited to colour or pattern, the world is your oyster and you can customize your embellishments any which way you choose.

This is how you make a bow. Fold the ribbon to form a circle and pressing into the middle, stitch the two sides at the center like so.

Use excess ribbon to pinch it in the middle and sew that together.

Layer the sides and sew it.

Get something like this. Sew it to the pillow case wherever you thing is aesthetically to your preference.

I made two pillows and changed the style. The second one I made the insert myself with cotton quilt batting. It looked really nice together and they match perfectly because I used the same scraps.

She loved the present and took it with her to her new apartment, so if you're looking to make something sentimental but still design-savvy, this is definitely the project idea for you!

Enjoy!

-czaR2D2 

DIY Dip Dye!

Mmm... So this past Wednesday, chelC-3P0 and myself decided to do some dip dye projects, this ended up being the turn out:

Of course, we wish we could give you a step-by-step tutorial, but at the moment we're lacking in adequate photographs to demonstrate what we did. I think this should suffice though

Essentially, we filled a bucket with steaming water, mixed the powder dye until fully dissolved; in this particular instance, we only had fuchsia dye - TULIP brand..

Then we dipped the top OR bottom of the dresses into the dye, depending on which ended we wanted to be fully saturated with colour.

We let the ends soak up the colour to get the faded effect of going from heavy saturation at the ends into a gradual desaturation until the opposite ends of our dresses were white.

However, after putting it into the wash BEFORE letting the entire article of clothing dry, the white portions of our dresses turned a very light pink.

Personally, we both think it looks better that way, but if you do want to maintain the white ends, then we suggest you let the dye dry out--depending on how heavily soaked the fabric is, this may take up to 8 hours.

Anyway, once we were ready, we popped the clothes into the washer; just follow your standard washer/drying procedure with appropriate detergents and fabric softeners; as long as you let the dye sit for long enough, you wont have a problem with the colour washing away.
Pop it in the dryer, et voila! DIY Dip Dye!