Sue has asked for instructions on reupholstering the office chair, so I’ve written a quick tutorial. If you do this yourself, please email photos to joinin {at} worldsweetworld {dot} com- I’d love to see!

1. Take a photo of your chair. Before and after pics are great.

2. Turn the chair upside down and unscrew the seat from the frame. Keep the screws in a safe place.

3. Lie your piece of fabric face-down on the floor, with the seat on top of it (also facing down).

4. Cut the fabric so it’s about 10cm bigger than the seat (more is better than less though!)

5. Using a staple-gun, start stapling the fabric to the seat. Put a couple of staples in the middle of all four sides, further in than the existing staples you see. Make sure you pull the fabric nice and tight.

6. Keep working your way round the seat. When you get to the corners, be patient and staple a little bit at a time. You’re aiming to have nice smooth corners without visible gathers, when it’s looked at from the top. This can be a bit hit and miss! When you’re done, trim off the excess fabric.

7. Cut a rectangle of black fabric about the same size as the seat, and, turning the edges under as you go, staple this on to the bottom of the seat, covering the staples and untidy edges that you just made.

8. Find where the original screw holes are, and poke holes through the black fabric.

9. Reattach the seat to the frame.

10. Unscrew the back and take it off. How you do this will depend on the exact model of your chair, but remember how you did it, as you’ll have to put it back on in the same way.

11. Insert a screwdriver or a blunt knife under the plastic of the chair back, and lever the plastic off. Ours was attached in 4 places with a pop-together fastening system.

12. Unscrew the spine of the chair from the padded bit.

13. Staple your fabric on, following steps 3-6 again. It was more tricky with the back, as we were stapling into plastic this time, rather than wood, but it doesn’t have to be super neat, as you’ll cover it back up with the plastic.

14. Screw the spine back on, and reattach the plastic. I had to stand on it to do this, but then, I’m pretty weak.

15. Finally, reattach the spine to the base. Easy, eh!

Last week I had a revelation. Every room in our house has nice, handmade, inspiring things in it, apart from the office. Not only is it boring, but as I’m not a very organised person, it’s also really messy. This is not the ideal situation, because it’s the room where WSW is created, where we need the most inspiration (and where it would be useful if you could walk, rather than jumping over things filed on the floor). Because I sometimes need tricking into tidying things up (bribes, rewards, etc), I’ve decided to tackle the room as a fun project rather than a chore.

It was a a rainy weekend so my first Office Trick-Up project had to be using materials that were already in the house. I covered my boring, forest green office chair with lovely cherry-blossom fabric that had been kicking round the sewing drawer for a while. It actually made me smile when I walked into the office this morning – I’m inspired to do more… mission accomplished (or at least started)!

(ok, the before shot is actually our other office chair – I forgot to take a before photo, but I swear it was as ugly, if not uglier than this one!)

Hannah