Super practical travel baby chair

When Little Monkey was a little more...little, and I was enjoying my maternity leave (thoroughly) by going out  for coffee with my fellow mums, 4 or 5 of us used to gather pretty much every afternoon to gossip and share our baby stories. We would usually go to a little independent cafe, and the place regularly would became a total mess of baby biscuits, empty cartons of formula milk, boobies in full view and screaming babies for the delight of other customers. Too much for the management of the place, also because it soon become apparent how many cafes just didn't have enough highchairs, and we all wished we could carry a little baby chair in our pockets.
Well, one day I was shopping and saw a pocket highchair by JoJo Maman Bébé which seemed to me just the perfect thing, but too expensive to buy and too easy to make. So I thought: I can do it!

I wanted to make it really resistant so I bought some pretty sturdy upholstery fabric to make the interior of my travel chair; I already had a Winnie the Pooh cotton fabric, and thought that it would look quite cute on the outside.
To cut the pattern, I took the measurements from my kitchen chairs, however I ended up modifying the design from what you see on the pictures, as the travel chair wouldn't adapt to wider chairs.
I unpicked the stitches at the sides of the pocketed end that goes over the back of the chair, and inserted a wide elastic band between front and back at both ends of the pocket. That allowed a bit more flexibility to use the travel chair in places other than my kitchen. To improve safety I also added a couple of loops at the back to feed the straps through - again, the pictures show an early version.

After a few trials and errors, I ended up with a pretty good, sturdy travel chair, comfortable but strong enough to resist a big baby's antics. When finished, the travel chair can be folded inside the pocketed end, and becomes really small, so super practical to carry in a bag or in the pushchair.
That was the perfect gadget to have with us when we were travelling to Italy on holidays, you can see how Little Monkey couldn't be happier (goodness me, she was so little in these pics!).