No, not the kid. I made that a while ago. I mean the tie-back chair thingy. This is one of those projects where I see something, decide I really want it, and then balk at the price and say to myself, "You can totally make this." Usually those projects are in various states of completion: either as ideas in my head or, more commonly, as projects that I've purchased items for but haven't found the time (let's be honest here) motivation to start, or as projects I have started but got bored frustrated with and haven't finished. This one I completed in record time! It took me all of an hour to do this.
Here's the inspiration:
It's called the Tie Chair. I originally saw it on Babysteals.com but it was like $40 or something. Gah! For $5 of fabric strategically sewn together?!? And that's supposed to be half-off retail. They also have them on Amazon for about $45. It seems handy but I was concerned about the kid just sitting on the chair itself. High chairs sit higher up than regular chairs so the child can reach the table. If a small kid (like mine all are) is sitting on a regular chair, I doubt they'd be able to properly reach the table. Plus I'd be cautious about using this somewhere like a restaurant until my kids can reach the table because I definitely don't want them putting food on the chair and eating off of that. Besides the price, these are the other reasons I hesitated. But I've found myself a few times caught without some kind of seating restraint device and thought, man, that tie chair thing would have come in handy. Especially when the kids are visiting someone's home that doesn't have spare high chairs laying around. Another bonus to this thing is that it's packable (like I need one more thing to carry in my suitcase of a diaper bag, but still...) With Sofia we had one of those portable high chairs that fold onto itself that we just kept in the car so we had it if we needed it. We didn't use it a ton so, unfortunately for it, that travel chair was one of the things we tossed after Sofia no longer needed it. Since the double stroller takes up my entire car, I really don't have room for a travel high chair, let alone two.
So I found some awesome fabric my mom gave me. Who knows where she got it from. White and blue stripes with pigs wearing suit jackets and ties reading Hog Law out of opened briefcases. My heart would not be broken if this project does not turn out and I had to toss the fabric. However, if I was successful, Hello! Suit wearing pigs with briefcases! Amazing! I sketched out all the pieces I thought I'd need and how it should all be assembled. Seemed easy enough. A pillowcase type piece for the chair back and a t-shaped crotch strap that could wrap around the chair to tie. I cut all the pieces out last night and once the kids fell asleep for their nap today, I sewed everything together. Assembled the crotch strap, attached it to the bottom of the chair back piece, sewed the chair back piece together and voila!
Thomas seems to like it!
The straps are long enough I can wrap them around twice and tie them in the back, like in the photos with Thomas, or I can just wrap once and tie in front like above.
If I strategically fold it up, I can wrap the straps around and it is even more packable than I thought it would be! My favorite part.
Here's a photo next to a ten ounce bottle for comparison.
If you really want to know how I put it all together... Here's my sketch. Since this was technically a prototype, when I make these again I am going to make the chair back portion bigger to allow for larger chairs. I have no idea if there is a somewhat standard chair back width, so I just used my kitchen chairs as a guideline, but there isn't a whole lot of wiggle room to use this on a wider chair. I believe the actual Tie Chairs have a 26" chair back width, which seems huge to me, but they have ties on the back to tighten the chair back to the exact width of the chair. Smart... Would have been smarter of me to do some research BEFORE sewing this so I could have tried that the first time. Oh well.
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