How to Choose Slipcovers for Chairs with Arms

How to Choose Slipcovers for Chairs with Arms

When looking for new furniture covers for decorating your home, don’t just focus on one room. For instance, slipcovers can be used to good effect in a dining room just as they can in a living room. If you’d like to give your dining room or eating area a cheap and easy makeover, here’s a quick buyer’s guide to choosing slipcovers for chairs with arms.

Style

Although most dining chair slipcovers are designed for armless chairs, covers for armed dining chairs are available. These are designed to cover the back, seat and legs of a chair, leaving the arms exposed. They are easy to fit, being held in place with ties and buttons.

The long skirted style can transform old chairs by hiding scratched or unattractive legs and giving the seats a whole new image. You can adapt the cover to suit the occasion or your taste in decor. For example, you could make the ties into a loop at the back for an informal, more relaxed look. Or you could tie them in a bow for a fancier style.

Fabric

If you often entertain guests or eat at your dining table every day, your chairs will get a lot of use. Food and drink will inevitably be spilled or dropped on your chairs, resulting in stained and grubby upholstery. It can be a lot of effort to scrub stains out of dirty upholstery, which is where a washable slipcover can help.

By covering the seat and back of your armed dining chairs with slipcovers you can protect them from spills. If food or drink gets on the slipcovers you can simply put them in the washing machine after the meal.

For this reason, the best slipcovers for dining chairs are made from durable, hardwearing material, such as cotton duck, which will withstand a lot of wear and retain its shape and color after washing.

Fitting Tips

By covering your dining chairs with arms you can give them an elegant and stylish new look on a budget, without the cost of reupholstery or buying replacement chairs. Using slipcovers is an inexpensive way to change the appearance of your dining room, whether for everyday use or for a special meal where you want to dress up your home to welcome your friends and family.

One handy tip is to have spare sets of covers so you can change the color of your chairs whenever you want to. For instance, you may want a light, natural color for summer evenings and switch to a dark, warm claret red in the winter.
Another way to give your chairs a custom look is to add padding to the seats and seatbacks before fitting covers over the top. You could use old blankets or foam batting to do this. By adding cushioning you can make worn or wooden chairs more comfortable to sit on, as well as getting a tighter fit if your slipcovers look too loose.

With minimal effort and a tight budget, it’s possible to use slipcovers to completely transform dining chairs with arms and give your room a fresh new image.

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