Knitting project — chair seat covers

One of the reasons there haven’t been many posts lately is that
I spent August and most of September battling pneumonia. Battling
in this case means spending a lot of time watching television,
which is boring even when you’re as sick as I was, so I made some
progress on my latest knitting project.

When I moved into my current condominium, I was thinking harder
than usual about interior decorating, and one of the things I
noticed was that all the chairs people were using to reserve the
spaces they’d shoveled the snow out of were nicer looking than the
1960-vintage dinette chairs I was using in my new dining room. One
of my friends was making furniture, so I asked him if he wanted to
make me some chairs.

They came out really nice, and we upholstered the seats with
some red high-quality cotton duck upholstery fabric. After my cat died, I
decided it was time to replace the seats which he had considered
very high-class scratching pads, and I bought some upholstery
fabric, which turned out to not be as high quality as what my
friend bought, so it’s now well past time to be replacing them again.

Chair with new seat cover

I realized that the chair seat is roughly the size of the front
or back of a sweater, and most of the fun of knitting a sweater is
the first front or back you do, so I’m knitting 6 sweater fronts
to replace the seat pad covers. I’m also replacing the foam
rubber, which is making them both better looking and more
comfortable.

I did a prototype with stash yarn that didn’t turn out to be a
very good piece of intarsia knitting, so I won’t show it to you.
The first real cover is from the Water Lily jacket in Alice
Starmore’s Book of Fair Isle Knitting.