How Much Fabric for a Chair?
Chair covers everything from a seat pad you lift out with two fingers to a wingback with a skirt. The honest answer runs from under a yard to well into double figures, so the first job is working out which one you have.
Work Out Which Chair You Have
Before any measuring, decide which of these you are actually recovering. The difference between the first and the last is not a percentage, it is a different order of magnitude.
| Chair | What gets covered | Scale of job |
|---|---|---|
| Drop-in seat pad | One board, wrapped and stapled underneath | Under a yard each |
| Dining chair, padded back | Seat, inside back, outside back | A couple of yards |
| Tub or occasional chair | Continuous curved inside, outside, seat | Several yards |
| Armchair | All of the above plus arms, fronts, deck | Around ten yards |
| Wingback with skirt | Armchair plus wings and a pleated skirt | More again |
A Lift-Out Pad Is Not a Chair
This is where most of the confusion starts. If your dining chairs have a seat that comes out when you turn the chair over and undo four screws, you are not upholstering a chair at all. You are covering a flat board, and it is one of the easiest jobs there is.
You need the pad size, plus enough to come down the sides and wrap underneath far enough to staple. For a 16 inch square pad about 2 inches thick that is a piece roughly 23 inches square, and two of those sit side by side across a 54 inch bolt. Six chairs comes to about 2 yards for the whole set. The vinyl guide works that exact layout through, since wipe-clean seats are a popular choice for a dining table.
From Dining Chair to Armchair
Now the fully upholstered versions. Run both through the upholstery calculator and the gap is stark:
- Dining chair (18 × 18 × 36 in): 2.5 yards
- Armchair (34 × 34 × 36 in): 9.5 yards
Nearly four times the fabric, and the armchair is nothing like four times the size. The extra goes into parts the dining chair does not have at all: two inside arms, two outside arms, two arm fronts, and a deck under the cushion. Each is a separate panel that has to be cut as its own rectangle, and every rectangle leaves a little unusable cloth around its edges.
If a dining chair reports more than you expected, that is usually the reason. The model covers the seat, the inside back and the outside back, not only the part you sit on.
Buying for a Set of Six
Matching chairs bring a problem a single chair does not. They will be seen together, in a row, under the same light, and small differences that nobody would notice on one chair become obvious across six.
- Ask for one continuous length. Colour shifts between production runs, and two chairs cut from a second roll can read as a slightly different shade.
- Decide motif placement once. With a patterned cloth, work out where the design sits on the first seat and repeat it exactly, rather than cutting each seat wherever it falls.
- Cut all six before assembling any. Discovering you are half a panel short after four are finished is a bad afternoon.
- Keep an offcut. Chairs get damaged, and matching the cloth years later is close to impossible.