Tips for re-covering a chair when you have no clue what the fuck you are doing (1)
Posted 24 October, 2007 in DIY
My dad, who’s redoing his house, recently gave me a matching couch and chair that had sat for many years in a little room off his kitchen. They’re in the Louis XV style, and covered with faux needlepoint fabric. I don’t have pictures of the actual pieces, but here’s a photo of another chair that will give you an idea of both the style and the fabric.
My pieces are made of darker-colored wood than the chair in the photo. I like the shape of the chair, and of the couch, which looks similar, but is longer. (”You don’t say!” I hear you cry.) What I can’t stand is the needlepoint fabric. My mum, may she rest in peace, was all about this type of fabric. (She also insisted that a bed was never truly made unless it wore a bed skirt. And she had an unhealthy wicker fetish.) This particular chair and couch (which I’m pretty sure Mum picked up from Sears) was covered in needlepoint even more obnoxious than the kind in this photo. It depicted several young lads and be-bonneted lasses having a lovely countryside picnic. I know that my mum wouldn’t have minded me re-covering the couch and chair - she’d probably have encouraged me to do so; she knew of my dislike for flowery patterns, plus she was a DIY aficionado. She also liked to jump into projects without first stopping to figure out exactly what she was doing. I think she passed that trait on to me. I decided I was going to re-cover these pieces, even though I really hadn’t the slightest idea how to go about doing so.
I looked around for upholstery classes in my area, and couldn’t find any. Thus, once again, the trusty Internet came to my aid, as did my costume-designer neighbor, who gave me two invaluable books: Singer Upholstery Basics and Simply Upholstery. From these books, I learned that it’s a good idea to save the chair’s original pieces of fabric once you’ve removed them; you then can use them as pattern pieces when cutting out your new fabric. I also learned how to make a Y-cut, which is exactly what it sounds like: a Y-shaped cut - not unlike the incision morticians make in a dead body - that allows you to fold wrap fabric neatly and tightly around a chair’s arm or leg. There were several elements of the re-covering process, however, that I learned by fucking them up the first time.
Taking the old fabric off these chairs meant manually removing yards and yards of individually applied decorative nails with a tack remover. (Check the picture to see what I mean by decorative nails - they border the fabric on the back of the chair, the arms, and the seat.) I quickly learned to do this in shifts, since some of the nails were pretty deep in there, and all that prying left me with large bruises on the palm of my left hand (the one holding the tool to do the prying). I also learned to work with the tack remover facing *away* from my right hand, which was holding the chair steady. Before I learned this, I pried too hard and my hand slipped, and I gouged chunks out of my right index and middle fingers with the sharp ends of the tack remover. (Actually, I did this again yesterday. I have a tendency to get obsessed when it comes to finishing projects, and in my determination to pull a lot of nails out very quickly, I forgot what I had already learned about gouging myself.) Another time I slammed my left hand down onto my right, and had a lumpy purple index finger for a week or so. Good thing I am hardcore and scoff at injuries.
I had another fun adventure when I heard about, and decided to search the Internet for, nailhead trim. This is a continuous strip of decorative nailheads, with a hole every five (or three, or nine) nailheads so that you can hammer a real nail in and hold the strip down. It doesn’t look quite as good as it would if you hammered in individual nails - you can sort of tell that it’s a strip if you look closely - but it saves you hours of labor. The problem was, I wasn’t quite sure what this trim’s official name was. I tried Googling “nail strip,” “continuous nail,” “brass strip,” “false nails,” and many other variations, but I kept coming up with some scary-looking strip of weird pointy Dracula’s-teeth-looking things, which I knew was used for upholstery in some way, but which was not what I needed. Finally I happened upon the term “nailhead trim.” This was before I got the books from my neighbor. I called Diamond Foam and Fabric and they had no clue what I was going on about. Eventually I called a small upholstery shop in the sun-charred, tumbleweed-ridden corner of the San Fernando Valley where I work. They had trim. I went to get it. Unfortunately, it was so dark in the upholstery shop (there was no AC, so I imagine it got too hot when the lights were turned on) that I later discovered the guy had given me trim and nails of two completely different colors. Back to the Internet I went, where, after several more hours of sleuthing, I finally found DIY Upholstery Supply, which had the trim and the nails to match. What the hell? Is upholstery like magic or something, where you can’t divulge the tricks of your trade lest you get flung out of the business? Maybe I am the David Copperfield of upholstery, luring pretty young upholsterers into my lair, only to strip them of their knowledge and take advantage of their willingness to help me out, and now everyone is on to me. Or perhaps I am simply a Criss Angel-type, the douchebag of upholstery, and no one ever wanted to help me in the first place.
To prevent this post from becoming tl;dr (too long; didn’t read), I will end here. Next time on Upholstery Fuckups: the importance of picking fabric to match your cat; occasions when “gimp” is not an offensive term; and the coolest little hammer in the known universe.