Miscalculating my skill set

by Wendy Scheel | Jul 30, 2015 | DIY

Incase you have forgotten, I love estate sales.  And for some reason I am always drawn to the chairs.

When I first started going to estate sales I would buy all wood chairs, no fabric on them.  I would clean them up and usually paint them.  But I wanted to branch out. I wanted to try re-upholstering a chair.  This is the chair I branched out with. Go Big or Go Home Wendy!

How hard could it be to take off each piece lay it out on some new fabric and tack it back on?  Seriously, how hard? So I started and I removed all of the fabric and then painted the wood.

So far so good and only a couple of hours of work. Then I put the old fabric on top of the new fabric and started cutting. BUT, I didn’t mark anything down as to where the new pieces were suppose to go!  I had so many different size pieces and no idea how to put it back together.  Ugh.

Instead of trashing the whole thing and losing the $40 I had into it,  I cut off the arms of the chair so I didn’t have to re-upholster them!  Bra-ill-ient!

Now it was just a matter of sewing a couple of square corners and, done.

(I will share more about this chair on another day. It is now part of my daughters first apartment. )

Since biting off more than I could chew in the re-upholstering department, I have reverted to buying chairs that aren’t so difficult to re-upholster.

Exhibit A:  This chair that I painted and re-upholstered the seat.

Exhibit B: This rocking chair. It needed a little  TLC and an update of fabric. And here is how I did it.  The right way.

After removing the fabric, I washed the wood with water, dried it and polished it up with Hemp Oil from the Miss Mustard Seed line of products.  Instant beauty.

I knew I wanted to go with the French Farmhouse fabrics to replace the not-so-desirable fabric that was on the chair.  Here is the line of pillows made from French Farmhouse style fabrics in my shop that I chose from.

The winner for me was the beige/khaki line fabric.

So, I removed the old fabric pieces and laid them out on top of the new fabric to cut them out. With only two pieces I figured I would know where to replace them.

Self explanatory right? The same process was used when the head rest part of the chair needed a little padding. To hold the padding and fabric in place I used some basting adhesive.

Incase you were wondering, this was the brand of basting adhesive I used to hold everything in place. Incase you were wondering. 🙂

And now for the big reveal…..always my favorite part.

And one more beautiful collage.

I haven’t attempted another large re-upholstering project.  Going Big or Going Home! wasn’t the best choice.  🙂 Have any of you miscalculated your skill set when trying a project?

And as a side note, Spencer my product photographer didn’t take some of these pictures.  I think it’s pretty evident, but in full disclosure, wanted to point it out.  🙂