(a chair covering adventure)
This is the end result, but if you want to hear the whole story…
I switched jobs a few years ago, and while the change was terrifying and hard, I cannot tell you how happy I am. But even the best times come with their own… challenges. Since I’ve been at my new job, I’ve moved desks 5 times and been in 3 different buildings. From being at the same job for 23 year to that was… a lot. And some of the temporary spaces were not terribly temporary and less than ideal, but the end result is a place I’m quite happy with (except the parking challenge, that’s a whole different story).
Anyway, we moved from one building to another to consolidate the department (already knowing that this was a temporary setup), but then the building we moved into underwent renovations, and we were moved to another area, then another building… Through this I volunteered to help keep everyone informed and I was a point contact for all the move coordination.
This did mean when we were moving back, and all the furniture moved back, I was first there to “organize” - aka grab all the common area stuff we needed, including guest chairs for everyone’s desks. This turned out to be quite the to-do. While some people had tagged their previous chairs, others who didn’t have them before needed them, and there weren’t a lot of matching sets, and I spent a good few hours dragging chairs to desks to reserve them.
Chair drama. Who saw that coming?
People hated the chair patterns. People who weren’t as quick didn’t get matching sets. It was… actually kind of epic.
I may have grabbed one of the less offensive patterned sets for myself. I figured I deserved it, being the one who raced around and moved about a ton of furniture. But they weren’t perfect, you can see the tear in this picture. Still, it was fine.
Except the drama continued. So I hatched a plan. A plan to possibly make my chairs the UGLIEST in the building, just to… okay, maybe create more drama? I honestly don’t know what I was thinking, other than I had a ton of yarn, hands that don’t like to be idle, and a penchant for being obnoxious.
The only question was… how exactly was I going to pull this off? And could I really, truly, honestly stick with the random colors fate threw at me, even when they made me cringe? (The only rule I had was I would only use a color once per square, if I rolled the same number I already had for the square I did get to re-roll.)
The easy part was picking the granny square patter, I’d used the Spring Court Granny Square when I made the Granny Square Chicken, and loved it! I also decided that, for unity, the last round on all of them would be black.
So with a table full of balls of yarn, and a trusty D20, it began… …in mid 2025. To be fair, this was a LOT of granny squares. And I got sidetracked a lot.
I did occasionally have to jail a D20 and switch it out if the colors were TOO obnoxious. I also did sometimes roll all the colors at once with a handful of D20s, but decided I preferred the one at a time method.
I think each chair took about 74 granny squares, plus some fill-in crocheting, and so much sewing! I did some test-fits early on to try to determine how many I would need, but ultimately I had under-estimated and had to crochet an additional 10 squares per chair (after I thought I was done!).
Despite all the figuring and fitting, in the end I don’t think I quite did it the way I originally intended, and I wanted to have both ready to go so I could do both of them at the same time, but I also really wanted to FINISH something so I did get one done back in… January? February? And then the next one I think I finished late April.
They are fully covered, front and back, and sewn onto the chairs around the arms and kinda tightened around the bottom. I want to say they probably took me a good 50-60 hours each. I steamed them once they were sewn on to help the seams relax and get them to hug the chair as best they could.
Also, the two blacks I used were NOT the same, one was an old Caron Pound of Love and the other was Red Heart, so I had to make sure I kept the two piles separate. They don’t look really different even with the chairs sitting next to each other, but if you held up the two right next to one another, it was obvious.
People sometimes hesitate and ask if they can sit in them, I say of course you can, the point is for them to be used!
There are some squares I really love, and some I cringe to look at, but overall I think it works!
These chairs look absolutely amazing 
