No Sew Chair Ruffles!

Sorry to leave you hanging. Here is a quick tutorial for turning a chair like this:

Into this:You will need: Scissors
Staple Gun & Staples
Fabric Glue -OR- Sewing Machine
Tape Measure
Iron
Fabric
To figure out how much fabric you need, decide how long you want your ruffle to be. I wanted mine to be about 4" long. Then double that length and add at least one inch. So for my 4" ruffle, I needed a 9" wide strip of fabric.
Then figure out the length of the fabric: I added up all the lengths of the sides of my chair seat (i.e. 13+15+15+17= 60) and then multiplied that times 2. (And then I added a little extra for good measure. So I needed a strip of fabric that was 130"x9" for each chair. I'm a very visual person, so I sketched something like this out to help me figure out how many yards I would need: So since all my strips fit side by side on a 45" wide bolt of fabric, I just needed a piece that was 130" long. (130"/36"(or 1 yard) = 3.6 yards.) Is your brain hurting yet?
Now that I had my fabric, I had to cut out the strips I needed for the ruffles. (I actually tore mine so I wouldn't have to stress about cutting a straight line.) Then I folded just a quarter inch or so of the ends over and used fabric glue to keep them in place.

Then I folded the fabric in half so I had a 4.5" wide strip of fabric. Then I was ready to staple - finally!

Side note - I should mention here that my chair is a little different from most in that the back of it had to be done separately since the sides of the seat are not one continuous piece all the way around - the back of the chair separates the back of the seat from the other 3 sides. (Does that make sense at all?) If this is the case with your chair, multiply the length of the back of the chair by 2, cut the fabric to that length, fold the ends under with fabric glue, and then start with the instructions below.
It's all down-hill from here.
If you have a chair like mine, do the back first. Staple each end of the strip of fabric to the corners of the back, then follow the directions below for the rest of the chair.
If you have a chair that you can do a ruffle all the way around the seat, staple the fabric in one corner, then measure out the fabric to determine where the fabric should meet up with the next corner of the chair. (i.e. If the side of the chair that you started with is 15" long, 15x2=30, so measure 30".) Then staple that corner. Go all the way around the chair, overlapping where you started just slightly. You should have something like this: Next, I simply pulled the middle of the fabric out to find the middle, and then stapled that to the middle of the side of the chair that I was working on:I'm sure you could measure if you're not comfortable eyeballing it. Then just continue to divide the loose sections in half and staple to the chair, until you get something like this: Then start at the beginning where you first stapled the fabric to the chair and smooth out the ruffle, press it down onto the side of the chair so that it looks like this: and staple it in place. I smoothed down all the ruffles on the side I was working on before stapling any to make sure that it looked even. After you staple the ruffles all the way around the chair, you should have something like this:
Be careful to staple far enough back so that the staples won't show when you replace the seat of the chair!
If you're OK with less than crisp ruffles, you can stop here. I wanted mine a little more tailored looking, though, so I took out the iron and went over them a little. It also helped them to lay flat instead of sticking straight out.
Then I replaced my seat, and voila! I have a newly recovered chair with ruffles! Now just 3 more to go!