About ten years ago I bought some camping chairs and they have had a lot of use, but when I got them out of the shed earlier on this year I noticed that the plastic fabric had become completely degraded and it was literally crumbling to pieces. The metal frame was still good and so I decided to buy some nice cotton canvas and re-make them!
1. The fabric
I bought this beautiful cotton canvas from Higgs & Higgs and it’s a blue and silver pattern with palm trees. I was surprised by how soft it was when it arrived, it would actually be a great fabric to make a skirt or dress out of. For the chairs though I quickly realised that it would need quite a bit of reinforcement. I had an old shower curtain (polyester, but not plasticy) which was very sturdy and so I decided to use that, along with some fusible interfacing.
2. The pattern
Obviously there was no pattern for these, but I could just about measure the sizes of the different pieces from the old chair material. I also had enough fabric to re-make the bags for the chairs, so I had to create a pattern for that as well. I traced around them onto a piece of paper, and then tidied it up a bit. The design of the chair is really clever and very fabric efficient. I had to do quite a lot of thinking about how I was going to sew it all together, and I added in extra seam allowances for different sections. I also decided to use bias binding on all of the edges to give a bit of further reinforcement.
3. The challenges
The biggest challenge I had with these chairs was persuading my sewing machine to sew through the rubber pads which were on the original chair as reinforcements. I used a jeans needle, with thick thread and my longest stitch length, and it worked okay to start with but after a while the mechanism in my sewing machine loosened, and I had to tighten the screws. I found this a bit concerning so I did more hand sewing after that. My vintage singer is a real workhorse and it can take a lot of force and bashing about, but I don’t want to abuse it!
It also took me a very long time to finish these chairs. It was partly because I didn’t have a clear pattern and so at each stage I was having to think about how I would get different things to work. There were also lots and lots of seams to sew, and two chairs to do. I think it took me about 3 weekends of work to finish them, and I was certainly very happy to be finished by then.
4. The final result
I love the look of these, and they are a million times better than the previous chairs. However, I made quite a big mistake when I was reinforcing the fabric. I aligned the canvas and polyester curtain with the grain running the same direction. Consequently the diagonal bias on the canvas and the shower curtain fabric allows quite a bit of stretch, so the chairs have more give than I intended. I also think that they’ll sag quite a lot over time. I have considered adding in an extra piece to the underside to fix that, but I will do that another day. For the moment I’m just very glad to have these finished and be able to sit and drink my tea outside in the sunny garden.
The sewing resolution 