Slip Covers

When Tim and I got married, lo these almost 14 years ago, we stopped off at Ikea on our way from our honeymoon to our new apartment in the Chicago suburbs. There we purchased a table and chairs that would be our only table and chairs for close to 10 years and our primary choice of table and chairs for the remaining years past that. However...as is common with Ikea furniture that is moved hither, thither and yon with any amount of frequency, the chairs were becoming less and less reliable. In fact, it was to the point that before sitting, it was a wise idea to carefully survey the legs and make sure that they hadn't come unscrewed (and if they had to see if you could find the screw and put the chair back together) before sitting. (Tim's mom learned this the hard way when they lived with us. Sadly, her 90 pounds was enough to send the chair crashing to the floor. She was uninjured but the chair was totaled. I was hardpressed to do anything other than be thankful that someone who weighed more was not the one who broke the thing.)

So it's been on our minds to replace the set and finally we did. In the meantime, I've been craving an island that can actually be sat at. (There's something wrong with the grammar there, but I'm not really inclined to fuss with it.) So, putting the two needs together, we ended up back at Ikea, where we purchased two of their Stenstorp kitchen islands, and the Hendriksdal barstools.

Currently, the islands are in an L off our existing island, but I'm not sure if that configuration will be permanent. We could turn them to face one another and approximate a square table and I will at least play with that configuration at some point to see what I think. Regardless, the chairs are lovely, though I didn't realize that I needed slip covers for them. So...I looked at what Ikea offered and found that they offered only white. Now seriously, I don't know about you, but I do not need to put white slip covers on a chair that I'm eating on. (Let alone something a kid is going to eat on). I might as well just splatter food all over the chair and be done with it before I do that. I found some aftermarket slip covers, but they're from overseas and it was going to be $300 for 4 of them plus they were dry clean only. And I can sew reasonably enough to avoid that. Even better, I can pin and my sister can sew better than I can.

Thus it was that we went from this:



To this:



To the final product of this:


I'm very pleased.