Stripes for furnishing fabric: covering a chair

The chair in my weaving room needed a new seat cover.  I decided to weave some fabric and do it myself.

Chair needing a new seat cover

Designing the stripes.

I thought about the seat cover and decided that I would try to make the stripes link up to the chair back.  I made yarn wraps to see what the stripes would look like.  I had to measure the distance between each stripe and make a small allowance for shrinkage so that after finishing the material would fit the chair and the stripes would be in the correct place. 

My initial sketch of pattern and one of the yarn wraps.

My initial ideas were put to the test.  I wove a short sample and then adjusted the strip widths so that they would correspond to the width of the slats on the chair back.

Weave structure: Swedish cross twill.

drawdown for Swedish cross twill

The furnishing fabric was woven using four shafts.

Warp: bleached 16/2 cotton
Weft: half bleached Lintow 8
colours: Lintow 6 in white, black and grey

Sett: 36 epi

Reed 12 sleyed at 3 per dent
Selvedge: sley and extra thread in the final dent.
 

Wide stripe close up

 For the wide stripe in the centre the weft sequence is:

White: 4       4      4     4          4     4     4         4
Black:     16                      16                     16
Grey:                8     8                 8     8

Medium stripe sequence

The weft sequence is:

White: 4      4      4      4
Black:     8              8
Grey:             16

Narrow stripe sequence

The weft sequence is:

White; 2      4       4     2

Black:             8

Grey:      4             4

Recovered chair.

The seat was easy to re-cover.

The material is very sturdy and will wear well.  The original idea for the fabric came from an  old Vav Magasinet magazine, no 4, 1997, p31.  I love Swedish design and Vav Magasinet has such beautiful patterns.

This is the picture for the material in Vav Magasinet.

I wove a length of this material to cover a seat in the vestibule.  It is now old and well used as you can see.

Seat cover 

close up of material

I used the same colours as the pattern in Vav Magasinet as it fitted perfectly with the existing paintwork and the rug I had woven.

Looking at the old cover for this blog made me realise that the foam covering for the seat has become rather soft.  I think that I will have weave another length of this material and re-cover the seat.





Happy Weaving


Susan J Foulkes      June 2016