A Crocheted Stool Cover

On one of my many (many, many) recent trips to IKEA I bought two Frosta stools. One for the dining room to be used as extra seating should we need it and the other for the porch, to go next to the shoe rack. Whenever my children put their shoes on, they like to sit on either the bottom step of the stairs or right in front of the front door while they battle with laces and straps. Both places are inconvenient for rushed morning exits from the house and I hoped that the stool might encourage a happier, less shouty, departure on school mornings. 

I digress.

So, I had my stools (£8 each, a bargain) but thought them a bit dull and for a long time had fancied making some circular covers. I'd seen a pattern in my Granny Squares book and thought I'd have a go. The pattern is essentially a circle working out from the centre (very similar to a mandala I would imagine) with decreases so that it fits around the stool. If you were reasonably good at crochet you could probably turn any mandala into a stool cover by adding a few rows decreasing, then a few more straight rows to create "sides". 

I thought I'd share how I made mine as, while I liked the pattern on the circular stool top, I found the rest of the pattern (you know, like how to make it actually stay on the stool) a bit lacking in details. 

Make your circle, stopping when it is about 1 cm smaller than stool. 

This is so that your cover remains nice and tight. (Baggy, saggy crochet is as appealing to me as a too-short scarf.)

Then make your decreases, following whatever pattern you're using or just making it up as you go along if you're cleverer than me. Your cover will now look a bit like a floppy fabric tray or bowl.

I found that my stool cover would sit on the stool fine like this, but would slip off the minute anyone sat on it, and so I wanted to make mine more secure. 

Attaching the cover to the stool seemed the safest thing and so I placed the stool cover on the stool and, using safety pins like below, marked where the four stool legs would go.

I worked a row of double crochet stitches between these safety pin markers, leaving the ends long.

Then I used the long ends to tie the cover tightly around each stool leg. 

I didn't know what to do about the dangling thread ends and darning them in seemed like a waste of time as I would inevitably want to remove and wash the stool cover at some point. Washi tape secured them neatly to the underside of the legs.

And there you have one very secure stool cover. It might slip and move a little when you sit on it, but it won't fall off and, more importantly, it wont be baggy.

As well as making the covers, I also jazzed up my stools with some paint, spraying the feet of one pink, and painting the other white. 

How to spray the feet:

First decide which area you want to paint, wrapping masking tape carefully and securely around each foot, making sure they're all the same height. Then cover your entire stool apart from the parts you want to spray paint. This stuff gets everywhere. I used a combination of old tea towels, kitchen paper and masking tape to wrap mine up. To get the coverage I wanted, my project took four light coats of paint, with a couple of hours drying time between each one.

When the paint is dry, unwrap your stool and carefully peel away the masking tape on each foot. You should be rewarded with a nice clean line. Ahhh, so satisfying!

Like peeling off a plaster, but prettier.

The pink-footed stool lives in the dining room, while this one below is for the porch. I painted the whole stool white (two coats of undercoat, two of white eggshell) and used the same shade of green as the one on the walls, with white, pink and black for the cover. 

It looks great in the porch, next to that shoe rack, and is so far being used as somewhere to dump stuff like bags and lunchboxes while the children continue to put their shoes on right in front of the door or sitting on the bottom step of the stairs.