Methods for making a comfortable do-it-yourself hanging chair
Fans of comfortable outdoor recreation often equip their suburban areas with gazebos, hammocks, swings. And relatively recently began to use hanging chairs, in which it is convenient to rest reclining. They can be placed both on the street and in the house. They provide relaxation and peace for the seated person, and in a large house they will certainly become an interior decoration. Making a hanging chair with your own hands is not at all difficult. For this, the use of improvised materials and simple tools is often sufficient.
Content
Varieties
There are several types of hanging chairs. By design, they are divided into frame and frameless. The frame serves as the basis for the materials with which the furniture will be braided. The frameless version is a piece of cloth folded in half, fixed with the ends to the base stand or hook on the ceiling.
Depending on the shape and design, such models can have different purposes:
- swing chairs - for entertainment;
- nest chair - for a comfortable stay;
- cocoon chair creating an atmosphere of solitude in nature.
Hanging chairs in the interior of a balcony or terrace always look original. Products in the form of a cocoon or drop suspended on a steel stand will be appropriate on the lawn in the shadow of a spreading tree. Solid dense sidewalls will shelter the vacationer from the wind and drafts. And you can make a hanging chair for a child’s room together with your child. It is convenient to play, relax, read books in it, and the child will certainly be proud of the fact that he also took part in the process.
An interesting option is a do-it-yourself wicker chair suspended from a thick horizontal branch of a large tree in the garden or directly to the ceiling in the living room. For such a design, no rack is required. This is convenient because the furniture will not interfere when mowing grass or during cleaning.
They differ in model and design. Furniture can be covered or braided with different materials:
- cloth;
- artificial or natural rattan;
- colored plastic cord.
The choice of chair type and material depends on the purpose of the hanging furniture and the design of the room.
Sizing and drawing
Before proceeding with the manufacture of the chair, you need to determine what size it will be. In a large-sized one, if you surround yourself with a large number of pillows, of course, it will be more convenient, but a small one can sometimes seem more comfortable. In addition, if you have to use a chair indoors, then its size will depend on the area of the room.A large object in a small room will look bulky and ridiculous, no feeling of comfort will work.
A child’s hanging chair can have a seat size from 50 to 90 cm, and an adult - from 80 to 120 cm. The height of the finished structure will depend on the installation method. To make the self-made hanging chairs safe, you need to carefully calculate their carrying capacity. Baby should support the weight of the seated about 90-100 kg, and adult - 130-150 kg.
Having determined the size and purpose, you can make a small drawing in which the model will be depicted in scale. This makes it easier to calculate the dimensions of the parts used during assembly. All frame elements can be drawn separately on paper, and then transferred to blanks, increasing the size.
When drawing up a drawing, you can take as a basis any ready-made version or draw your own. It is also necessary to draw up the atmosphere in which the chair will subsequently be installed or suspended, since its size must be determined, including taking into account the dimensions of the rest of the furniture. But the material for arranging the seat will have to be customized in the process, when the frame is ready. The amount of fabric or rattan to calculate using the drawings is unlikely to succeed.
Materials for the frame and base
For the frame, you can use steel, copper or plastic pipes, rods, tree branches. If you need to bend metal pipes, you will have to roll metal pipes on special machines, so it’s better to use an old gymnastic hoop of suitable diameter instead. The rods can be bent by pre-soaking them in water. Frame parts can also be made from PVC pipes or from metal-plastic pipes with a diameter of at least 32 mm.
For the base, round or profiled pipes can be used. In order for furniture to support the weight of the seated person, the size of the pipe section must be at least 30 mm with a wall thickness of 3-4 mm. The base must be made very stable to prevent the chair from turning over.
In the manufacture of a frameless chair from a piece of cloth, you can put a circle of plywood inside to give the seat a comfortable shape. Of course, it is necessary to sheathe it with a cloth and put pillows on top.
Of the many types of materials you need to choose the most appropriate furniture usage conditions. Fabric armchairs, for example, are inappropriate to use on the street, since in the sun most of these materials fade. Natural rattan is afraid of moisture, so it is not recommended to leave such furniture in the rain. But indoors it is better to use environmentally friendly natural materials.
Artificial rattan and plastic will well tolerate humidity, sun and temperature changes.
To braid the frame, you can use the macrame technique. This is the name of the type of weaving, for which textile cords, ribbons, ropes are used.
Model-specific work steps
To decide how to make a hanging chair at home, you can first consider the manufacturing techniques of several options and choose from them the most suitable for implementing your own idea.
For the manufacture you will need the following materials:
- pipes or rods of wood for the wireframe model;
- the material with which the frame will subsequently be covered;
- durable synthetic threads;
- rope with a diameter of 6-8 mm;
- batting, synthetic winterizer or thin foam rubber.
The composition of the materials may vary depending on the selected model.
On hoops
Using a gymnastic hoop, you can quickly make a wireframe model hanging on a hook mounted in the ceiling of a terrace, gazebo or children's room. To make it is not very difficult if you follow the instructions:
- You need to start work with the manufacture of parts for the seat.For the frame, you can use a steel gymnastic hoop with a diameter of 100-120 cm. To subsequently stay in the chair was comfortable, the hoop can be sheathed with synthetic winterizer.
- To fill the space inside the hoop, which will be the seat, you can use two fabric circles. The diameter of the circles should be 50 cm larger than the diameter of the hoop. It is necessary that the resulting seat sag on the frame. The fabric for the seat must be strong to support the weight of the seated person.
- Two fabric circles are sewn together using a sewing machine to form a cover that can be worn on a hoop. The seam should be on the inside of the cover.
- Next, on a stitched product, it is necessary to make semicircular cutouts of 5 cm in size at two opposite ends and overcast them with a sewing machine. Pieces of rope should be inserted into these cutouts, hooking them to the hoop and securing them with knots. The length of the segments must be adjusted so that the seat is at the desired angle.
- At the top, the ends of all four pieces of rope are connected and tied to a hook.
When making a seat out of fabric, first in one of the circles along a line passing through the center, you need to make a cut, the length of which is equal to the diameter of the circle. It is necessary to sew a zipper of the appropriate length into it so that the cover can be removed and washed if necessary.
If you use two hoops, you can make a voluminous frame, which subsequently needs to be braided with rattan or plastic cord. One of the hoops with a diameter of 80 cm should become the bottom of the seat, and the second with a diameter of 120 cm, forms the back. The procedure for manufacturing the chair is as follows:
- The smaller hoop is pre-stacked on a horizontal surface.
- From above, you need to lay a large hoop on it and, combining both on a small (35-40 cm) section of the circle, firmly tie them, braiding them with a cord or rattan.
- Bending up the edge of the large hoop that is not fixed, you need to fix it with two posts, which can be used wooden planks of the desired length. So that they do not come off, you can make small cuts in the end part to install the slats on the hoop. Subsequently, the racks must be braided.
- The circle formed by the lower hoop is wrapped in a cord or rattan. The material should be intertwined with each other, forming a grid with a step of 2-3 cm.
- The upper hoop, which will be the back, is braided in a similar way. In this case, weaving is performed from top to bottom and ends on the lower hoop. The remaining pieces of the cord can imitate the fringe for the resulting seat.
- Having tied four pieces of rope of the required length to the lower hoop, you need to connect their upper ends and hang the chair on a support or hook installed in the ceiling beam.
To make such a chair, it will take several hours of free time, and a comfortable corner for relaxation will appear in the interior.
Baby from fabric
A simple children's hanging chair can even be made from a large bath towel, if pieces of rope with a diameter of 6-8 mm are attached to each end of it. Their length is chosen experimentally. The ropes attached to the two corners forming the back should be slightly shorter.If you collect the ends of the four rope segments at the top and tie them to a support, you will get a small improvised seat that you can build anywhere: in a forest on a picnic, in a park during a walk, if the child is tired and wants to sit.
Cocoon Chair
If you need to figure out how to make a chair, simple and closed on all sides, a step-by-step instruction of the cocoon with your own hands will help. Such a chair from a piece of fabric 3 m long and 1 m wide can be made very quickly. To do this, you need:
- Fold the material in half and sew one of the sides 1.5 meters long. The resulting product must be turned out so that the seam is inside a kind of "bag".
- The top of the fabric seat is assembled, tied with a rope with a diameter of 6-8 mm. The result is a kind of bag tied on top, but not stitched on one of the sides.
- After hanging the seat inside the "bag" you can put a few pillows. You get a cozy cocoon in which the child can even hide.
Any of the options for home-made hanging chairs will require a certain amount of time, effort for manufacturing. But the result will definitely not leave indifferent households and guests.
Video