Adding Padded Seat Covers to Bar Stools

This project was fairly simple and the stools with their new padded seat covers looked so nice that I thought I'd share a few photos.  Recently, we picked up a couple of old bar stools for dirt cheap at an online auction, for using in our kitchen. After cleaning up the stools, we decided to staple padded covers onto the seats.  I purchased the canvas fabric, called Watercolor Houses, from Jo-Ann Fabric. 

My sister has added padded seat covers to chairs a number of times over the years and I've always thought they looked so nice (she has an amazing eye for color and design!). With her creative ideas to inspire me, I decided to give it a try.  

For about $16 at Jo-Ann, I purchased two green foam seat covers.  I already had some white felt for laying between the foam and the fabric. (The white felt isn't really necessary; I just decided to use it to give the fabric a smoother look, since I already had it in my fabric drawer.) The only tools that were needed were scissors and an electric staple gun.  I used 1/4 inch staples, which is what we had in the toolbox, but 1/2 inch would have been even better.

My staple job wasn't the best.  The legs of the stool kind of got in the way, and so I cut sections of the fabric shorter to work it around the legs.  Then I just stapled the fabric to the underside of the stool.

Shown below is the top of the covered stool. 

This fabric looks so charming in my kitchen!  For some reason, I'm drawn to ceramic houses and folksy drawings of houses. Below are a few ceramic houses that I have collected in the kitchen and adjacent pantry area.  

There aren't all that many display areas in my kitchen, but the few that exist have evidence of my love of little houses.

Even our coffee jar has a house on it, above.  The jar has gotten chipped and cracked, but I love it too much to throw it away.  It still has charm.

This fascination with charming houses goes back to my childhood, when as a little girl one of my favorite books was The Little House by Virginia Lee Burton (click to see the book read aloud on YouTube).

Both bar stools are finished and they fit very nicely in the kitchen. The stools tuck in easily underneath the overhang of the butcher block-style counter that my father-in-law built for us.