ReadyMade: Instructions for everyday life

A couple of weeks ago Garth went out of town and left the me alone with the house.  When Garth leaves for a weekend everything changes.  I don’t eat at regular times, I stay up working on things most of the night– things get done and I generally wear myself out.  When he is home I can at least be convinced that it is time to go to bed before by midnight.

I decided that in his absence I would take on my first ever upholstery job.

I love working with fabric and I also like figuring out how to make or fix something myself.  In this way re-upholstery satisfied both my creative/studio itch and my need to keep accomplishing things around the house.

I had three pieces of furniture in the house at that moment that I intended to reupholster and they ranged in difficulty and price from smallish and cheap, to large and extremely complicated.

I choose to begin tearing apart a chair we picked up at a garage sale for five dollars.  The chair was in solid shape, but the upholstery that it came with was hideous, faded, and stained.  Not only was this an affordable piece of furniture for me to begin experimenting on, it seemed like I could only improve it by removing the original fabric.

We have had this chair kicking around the house almost since we moved in and I was determined that it could eventually look good enough to go in the living room.  It took me a very long time to decide what fabric should be used for this job.  I hunted the local fabric shops and couldn’t come up with anything quite snappy enough, so I began to search the internet.  I can’t quite tell you how many fabric sites I scrolled through, but the hunt was becoming tedious– nothing tickled my fancy.

Our new couch is leather and kind of masculine, so it struck me that this dainty little chair needed to hold up next to that couch and not be too prissy.  Somehow this train of thought led me to houndstooth.  I love a houndstooth print, but I also like exaggerated patterns so I searched the internet to find the perfect large houndstooth–there weren’t a ton of choices but I ended up locating this print and ordering a swatch.  Most sites will send you a swatch if you have the patience to postpone your project for a bit, this was not a problem for me since we have about one hundred projects started in the house and four or five actually completed.

When I had approved my swatch I ordered five yards of the fabric after consulting this upholstery chart and choosing the chair that most resembled mine.

To begin this project I assumed a couple of things about upholstery:

1.  If I carefully remove each piece of fabric I can use the pieces as patterns for the new fabric.

2.  If I meticulously note (and photograph if necessary) the order in which the fabric comes off the chair I can re-upholster by following the exact opposite order.

These two rules turned out to work as I expected.

I first attacked the chair using a flathead screw driver and pliers.  I began to pry up the edges of the upholstery with the screwdriver (taking care not to scatch the exposed wood on the arms and legs of the chair).  It took several hours to completely skin the chair and remove all the staples that held the fabric in place.  During this process I took notes about which piece of fabric I removed from where and the order that they should be replaced.

Once skinned, the large sheets of stuffing that surrounded the chair began to fall away.  I labeled each pile of fuzz so I could return it to it’s rightful location when the job was finished.

Now that the chair was naked, I checked the under-structure to be sure it was sturdy.  In this case there was no need for any gluing and clamping to prevent it from falling apart later.

At this point I spread out my fabric and laid my pattern pieces (the fabric I had just removed) out to plan my cutting.  With my large print, I needed to pay attention to the direction I laid each pattern piece to ensure that the design would be running in the same direction on all sides of the chair– one oddly placed pattern piece can ruin the entire illusion of the houndstooth.

I did not have to do much actual sewing to re-upholster this chair, the bulk of the work was stretching fabric and stapling it in place.  The minimal sewing that did take place was to sew the channels that hold stuffing and run down the front of the chair back and making piping that is used to hide all the horrible looking staples that it takes to hold upholstery fabric in place.  Piping is essentially a little rope stitched into a strip of fabric.  On a chair or couch it often runs along the edges of the fabric to make the piece look nice and finished.

To make the piping I simply pulled the little rope out of the piping from the original upholstery and folded it into a long strip of my houndstooth fabric.  Using the zipper foot on my sewing machine to stitch as close to the enclosed rope as possible, I made exactly enough piping to add the finishing touches to my chair.

Now that I had all my pieces cut and my piping ready I began to put the fabric back on the chair.  I first grabbed the fuzzy stuffing pieces from the labeled piles and stapled them in place using just a couple of staples– once the fabric was on it would hold everything in place.  At this point I returned to my notes and slowly began reattaching the fabric.  To attach the fabric to the chair I used a staple gun.  This was a slow process as it required placing the fabric just right, stapling a bit and then pulling the fabric tight to ensure that it laid flat and smooth.

Once everything was secure, smooth and stapled in place I turned to my piping and carefully stapled it around the edges of the chair, hiding any unsightly staples to the best of my ability.

I am pretty proud of my results.  The chair looks much better in the room and I am now confident that I can do this again (in fact, I just got the new fabric for our white couch in the mail!).

Garth already scolded me for not taking step by step photos of my process, and I apologize.  When I begin to work on the couch I will take process photos to better explain this step-by-step.  In the meantime, start hunting for your own fix-er-up chair.  This was fun and it completely transformed the chair.

If I can do this so can you!

*The lovely painting above my new chair is by the amazing Jen Bandini, recent Smithsonian Portrait Competition finalist.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 at 11:30 pm and is filed under Projects, Triumphs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.