A new seat cover!

I bought this little booster seat thing for Anna last summer. I got it off of craigslist for $10 (surprise, surprise). However, the blue polka dot cover for it was pretty ugly. It doesn't look too bad in this picture, but it is. It's old, faded and seriously looked like its prime was in 1985. I've been wanting to recover it for a while and finally got around to doing it. Even though it took me over a week to do it, when normally it should have taken 2 days, 3 at the most. This is what happens when you have two kids, instead of one! :)

I forgot to take a good before picture of it, but believe me, it was pretty ugly. Here is the new cover!

I originally was going to take the seam out between the bottom piece and the top piece, but it was sewn inside and I couldn't get it apart easily, so I took the lazier route and just sewed over the old cover. I took off the original border/edge part. I don't know the real name for it. The border that is now brown.

What I ended up doing was laying the old cover over the new material and just tracing the sizes I needed. I decided to sew it in two pieces, the top and the bottom. I added 1/2 an inch to what I traced, just to make sure I had cut it large enough. I did this for the front and the back. I then sewed the back top piece over the original. Then sewed the bottom piece on. Since I had two pieces, I needed to sew them together, where they met up. I ended up hand sewing them together, since the angle was difficult to get on the sewing machine.

Here is a picture of what I'm talking about.

I just folded each piece over the other and hand stitched them together. This is where the bottom of the top piece and top of the bottom piece meet together. (make sense?)

I had to make holes for where the straps go. All I did was cut slits in the material, then hand stitched the sides to the original slits. It doesn't look very nice, but I figured no one would really be able to see it, since the straps would be there. I wanted to sew a brown border around it, but I didn't want to make it too small, so the straps wouldn't fit in there. It was kind of a tight fit with the original cover and I didn't want to mess it up.

After I sewed the front and back pieces, I attached the back top cover that goes over the back of the chair. I added a green border to that piece, so that it would have a little variety. I then pinned and sewed the brown border around the whole thing. That was the most difficult part because sometimes, depending on the way I had pinned it, it wouldn't sew through the front and back, so I would have to re-do a lot of parts.

The finished product!

In hindsight, I wished I had chosen blue material, so it would match the seat better. I actually found some cute light blue material, but didn't get it because I figured it would get dirty really easily. I didn't see any other blue material that I really liked. I was trying to go for a more gender neutral pattern, so Alex can use it when he gets bigger.