Chairs

Olwen Pen Aur's

Coleman Chair Covers

Several years ago, we bought two Coleman camp chairs, and have been very happy with them. My husband finds that they don't provide the lower back support that he'd like, but in every other respect, they've been great: sturdy, solid to sit on, and easy to fold and carry. A big plus for the SCA camper is that the shape of them is close to being plausibly medieval. The arms are too low, but the square shape is perfectly acceptable. Cover up the obviously modern materials, and they'll pass.

I initially made covers out of an old striped bedspread. It was very medieval fabric in orange, black and gold stripes (orange is a grossly underused colour in the SCA, considering how incredibly easy it ts to obtain with natural dyes) with inserts of brocaded scrolls. Okay, so a certain Baron of Lions Gate did ask me where the ottoman and TV remote were, because they looked so much like tacky living room furniture. But they were darn fine, in my opinion. And why do we assume people in the Middle Ages did NOT have tacky furniture?

So I made another set. It wasn't so much the tackiness that prompted me to make new ones, as that we found some really nice fabric on sale, and that the orange ones developed large holes where the stress of wear and tear showed.. So I made the second set very differently, and have been extremely pleased with the results. This is how I did it.

Here's your classic Coleman chair.

What I discovered from my first set of chair covers is that if you make the back and seat in one piece, every time you sit down you put enormous stress on the UPPER corners of the back. This is where mine wore out.
Possibly a hard chair wouldn't do this, but I suspect that the flexibility of the seat on these chairs allows the seat to go down a lot farther with weight on it than with a rigid chair, thus putting stress on the fabric joining the seat to the uppermost rigid part of the structure.

For my second and improved version, I made the seat and arms as one unit, with overlapping flaps that get pinned across the back. And the back of the chair is covered with a separate section that comes down over the overlaps behind. The inside back portion is long enough that it actually fits down behind the seat of the chair, so even when you sit down, pressing the seat down and sometimes shifting the cover, the back still covers.

This is the seat and arm portion of the cover, with the back flaps shown sticking out.

A is the seat
B from seat front to floor
A and B can be cut as one piece, or as two and seamed together, depending on your fabric.
C inside arm (cut 2) - match curve of metal arm
D outside arm from top of arm to floor (cut 2) - match curve of metal arm
E 2 1/2 inch wide strip
F back flaps that cover from side to side of chair (cut two)
Make sure to allow at least 1/2 inch seam allowance on each edge.

For the back portion, you need still more of E the 2 1/2 inch wide strip, so cut lots of strips. You may want to use a fabric that contrasts or complements your main fabric, rather than the same fabric.
G inside or front back from top of chair to about 6 inches below seat
H Outside back from top of chair to floor

With my first set of chair covers, I sewed the inside and outside arms together without that extra strip, and they never sat right. The tubing that Coleman chairs are made of is wide enough that a knife-edge seam just won't lie flat anywhere on it, so it tended to shift all the time.

I found that adding the extra strip of fabric helps keep the whole thing in place. It also makes the chairs look more solid, as if they might be made of wood or some other plausibly medieval material.

Putting the back section on after the seat portion has been adjusted and pinned in place

To put the chair covers on, I put the seat and arm section on first. Put the arms in place over the arms of the chair, adjust the seat so it fits. Then pin the back flaps together with safety pins in two or 3 places. The cover for the back will hide this. So the back flaps don't have to be made of the same fabric as the rest of the cover. My covers are made of a beautiful upholstery fabric in navy blue and gold. The back flaps are made of old black theatre curtain material. It's close enough in colour to the dark blue that the little bit that shows is okay. But it really doesn't show much, so don't waste money on something nobody ever sees (frugality is a medieval virtue). Just find something that will wear well in a colour that's not a wild contrast to your main fabric. Hot pink would be a bad choice here.

One more tip is that when Coleman chairs are set up, the back is taut and very hard to remove. But release that tension and the back comes off way too easily. You'll find that you'll take it off when you take off the chair covers, and may not even realize it.

A friend of ours solved this problem by drilling a hole in the tubing at the side, right at the base of the back fabric, then putting a small screw through the fabric and all. This holds the back on even when the chairs are folded.

You can leave the chair covers on even when you fold the chairs up and move them. We normally transport ours without the covers, so they take up less room and the covers don't get damaged or dirty during transport. Then we put the covers on when we arrive at the event, and they stay on for the whole event even as we take our chairs to Court or to friends' encampments for socializing.

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