Mexican Blanket Car Interior - DIY Ideas, History, & Vehicle Usage
Mexican-style blankets, or Serapes, have been a mainstay in the classic car world pretty much since the beginning of time. These blankets are sturdy, durable, and inexpensive, making them perfect for a budget refresh on your tattered seat upholstery. Some people use these to add a pop of color in an otherwise drab interior or to protect the original upholstery, while others use blankets to create a new seat cover from scratch. Either way, the end result of serape seat covers are a big statement in the interior of any vehicle.
Origins of the Mexican Blanket in Vehicles
There is no way to truly pinpoint where this trend of the Mexican blanket car interiors came from, but it has been part of the underworld of hot rodding forever. Back in the 40s and 50s, cars had poor heating systems if they had one at all, so most people kept blankets in their cars. In the southwestern states (California, Arizona, New Mexico), Mexican and Navajo blankets have long been a mainstay in gas stations and mercantile shops along the roadways. People used to keep a couple of these blankets in the car for warmth when they needed it. Over time, the blankets were draped out across the seats to cover worn upholstery or to protect the upholstery from wear.
What Kinds of Cars Usually Have Serape Interiors?
Eventually, the hot rodders of the 50s found that these blankets were an easy way to cover a seat in a T-bucket, Model A, or Shoebox Ford instead of spending their hard-earned cash at an upholstery shop. This Mexican blanket car interior styling remained in the SoCal scene on low-rent hot rods for decades until the movie Pulp Fiction featured a blanket rear seat cover, which ignited a firestorm of hot rodders all over the country using this style of blanket in their 60s and 70s cars and trucks. The Mexican blanket car interior trend has receded back to the niche ends of the hobby, but you still see this style on all manner of hot rods, lowriders, trucks, muscle cars, and cruisers. For this Mexican blanket car interior project, we are working with a 1956 Chevy Truck bench seat.
DIY Ideas for Mexican Blankets in Your Car's Interior
Making DIY Mexican blanket seat covers is not difficult, in fact, you can even do so without a sewing machine. There are numerous types of blankets you can use for these covers. The ones we are using here are Mexican Serape style, other styles include Navajo, Pendelton, or saddle blankets, all of which have a unique style. You don’t have to stop at the seats, Mexican blanket upholstery looks great on door panels and consoles, and even a Mexican blanket headliner lends a super cool vibe for a stylized lowrider or cruiser. A few DIY ideas for a Mexican blanket car interior include a headliner, door panels, dash covers, rear deck cover, trunk upholstery, and even wrapping custom console panels is a great way to incorporate more Serape blankets into your design.
We started with a 1956 Chevy truck that only had a bare seat frame, why not use a couple of Mexican blankets from Speedway Motors—they offer a blue or red Mexican blanket to create a custom seat cover from scratch. This project can use a Mexican blanket, in whole or part, on your existing seat. Keep in mind that this is a bench seat for a truck, so the rear of the seat will rarely be seen. If you are working on a rear bench seat, the back and sides will never be seen as well. For front bench seats, you will likely want to take a little more care to wrap the rear of the seat a little cleaner than we did here on this project.
Tools For Installing a Mexican Blanket Interior
To do this project you need a couple of specialty tools, mainly a set of quality hog ring pliers. You do not want to use cheap pliers like you might get with an upholstery kit. Thin bar-style pliers are hard to use and hurt your hands after just a few uses. You need a set of good quality professional hog ring pliers, even if you only ever plan to install one set of seat covers. Your hands will thank you for spending the $20-30 for a good pair of pliers. In most cases, all you need are straight-pliers, but a set of 45-degree hog ring pliers can get into tight corners better, so having both types is beneficial. We used a pair of straight pliers for the entire process on this seat.
You also need a pair of good upholstery sheers. These are not shop scissors, these are for fabric only. We used a pair of vintage 1950s Clauss upholstery sheers that we bought at a garage sale about 15 years ago and restored. If you use plain scissors, you will snag the fabric and they won’t cut clean, but they will work, just not as well as a dedicated pair of upholstery sheers. You can buy new professional sheers for 30-60 bucks at your local fabric shop. Just don’t ever cut paper, only use them for upholstery materials, otherwise they will dull quickly.
Hog Rings are the other thing you have to have for this project. Upholstery hog rings are large gauge wire staples that you bend with hog-ring pliers. They are quite literally the exact same thing used to ring a domesticated pig nose so they don’t root. Most upholstery rings are C-type, but there are also D and M type rings. The letter indicates the final shape when crimped.
If you have some experience with stitching, you can sew a blanket into a seat cover, however, sewing seat covers requires an upholstery sewing machine, a common clothing sewing machine is not capable of sewing through multiple layers of upholstery materials, and can quickly burn up the motor. With this in mind, we set out to make this cover in a manner that every hobbyist can handle—without a sewing machine. We do have an upholstery machine in the shop, but most hobbyists don’t, so we stuck to no-sew techniques that look good and work quite well for this DIY Mexican blanket seat cover. In fact, this style will last just as long as a stitched seat cover. There are a couple of caveats that you will have to accept—the corners of the seat cover are folded over. This is part of a no-sew cover; however, you can use fabric heat-bond tape after the job is done to permanently bond the folds together if you choose to do so.
The seat we are working with has a few extra steps because this is a bare seat frame. If your seat has existing upholstery or cushion foam/batting, you can skip this part. In order to make it work as a seat again, we have to repair a few springs that were broken. This is not difficult, but you can’t buy specific seat spring ties, you have to make them. We picked up some porch door return springs and stretched them out to make ours because we needed quite a few of them. Some seats like this are tied with string, typically jute rope. This is a labor-intensive project, luckily our springs were tied with metal springs instead.
The springs are the base for the seat, but you can’t just put upholstery directly onto the springs. You need either foam or cotton batting. For this Mexican blanket car interior project, we decided to use traditional cotton batting. This is available at any upholstery shop, and it just a roll of cotton sheet about 2 inches thick. This is what the truck seat would have used originally. Replacing foam is a little more work if you are making your own foam pads. If you are buying replacement foams, then you are likely spending for proper seat covers and not a budget cover like this. Universal foam requires shaping so that the edges and corners are rounded. You need a foam saw for this, and that is getting outside of the typical hobbyist realm. It isn’t hard to do, but a foam saw will set you back $250 or more. For our seat, we used three layers of cotton batting on the bottom and back cushions.
Each cushion also needs a couple of layers of burlap cloth. The burlap, which is typically made from jute string woven together (think of an old potato sack), covers the springs and creates a base layer for the batting, and then a second layer of burlap goes over the batting. This sandwich of material protects the batting from the springs and keeps it in place during the process of installing the blanket cover. Three to five layers of batting is good for most applications. The more layers you have, the more potential for shift in the layers, which leads to lumpy covers.
Another unique aspect of this Mexican blanket car interior project is that the lower truck seat frame does not have any hog-ring points. This seat used metal strips that clipped under the edge of the frame. In order to secure the new upholstery, we needed to add a listing wire around the perimeter. We used a series of self-tapping panhead screws placed about every 4-6 inches about an inch inward from the edge around the entire bottom of the seat frame. Then we ran some bailing wire around the perimeter and locked it down with the screws. This gives us a place to attach the hog rings. The seat back is made of wire, so we didn’t need to do this on the back piece. Most seats use wire frames, so this is just a unique case on this specific frame.
If you have some experience working with fabric and vinyl upholstery, this job will take you just a few hours, but even if you have never touched a set of hog ring pliers, you can do the entire seat in a day. You just need some patience and imagination and you can get the job done. Remember—hog rings are removeable, if you don’t like it, cut the ring and start over. Just don’t cut the blanket until you are done, that way you have options should you make a mistake.
