It only took 2 months but I have finally completed my chair! Turns out the
hardest most time consuming part was finding the right fabric. The hardest part was reupholstering it. What was I thinking? I think my confidence was high after my first two chair projects but there is a major difference between these chairs pictured below and a wingback. These chairs are pretty straight forward, especially the dining room chairs. The wingback is a huge fabric puzzle. I don't know that I could do it again...I'm calling this time lucky.
There are no good tutorials online about how to recover a wingback chair. There are a few but none of them get into the nitty gritty about how it's actually done so I just kinda winged it. Pun completely intended and I reserve the right to overuse it through this entire post. I had every intention of dutifully documenting the process and writing the grandaddy of tutorials on how to reupholster a wingback chair. Then I found out why there aren't any tutorials. It's impossible to document everything and once you get in the middle of it there is no way you have an extra hand available to snap a picture. So...I'll give you what I have and wish you luck!
Here's where we started and here is where we ended up.
The first step is deconstruction. When you are doing this the best thing you can do is make a list of what you take off and in what order. You're just going to look at the chair and figure out what seams you can see and what you can take off first. I'll give you an easy one first. Turn the chair over and take off the netting on the very bottom of the chair.
I would also grab a pack of sticky notes and some pins and label everything. It may seem obvious that this is the netting from the bottom of the chair but it's going to be a lot less obvious when you're looking at two angled rectangles and you can't figure out which arm it came off of. Trust me. Label your pieces.
I asked Derrick if he thought real upholsterers had better tools than I do and he laughed at me. Apparently that's pretty obvious. But I'm here to tell you it can be done with just the basics! If you're going to make a hobby out of this I would invest in some better tools but if you are just trying to tackle one chair, it can be done! My tools for the entire project were a manual staple gun (hello sore hands!), a flat head screwdriver, needle nose pliers, and a hammer.
The next piece to come off was the fabric piece on the back of the chair. Just wedge your screwdriver underneath the fabric and pry it up. If it's done well you will not think this is possible when you first look at it, but is is!
Work your way around and peel the back off the chair along the top and side edges until you get down to the bottom. See those nails sticking out of the edge of the fabric? That was a surprise to me! They are very sharp and they are attached to a cardboard strip. The fabric gets folded around the cardboard and the nails get hammered into the chair so that the seam looks nice and clean. I'm sure that didn't make sense. Sorry.
Once you peel the back down to the legs of the chair you've got to remove the piping to expose the staples at the bottom. Screw driver and needle nose pliers time. Pry and work those staples out. Turn on a good show. I'm hooked on Law and Order: SVU at the moment.
Here is a better view of those teeth. See the cardboard on the backside of the fabric and the nails sticking through the fabric? The fabric gets wrapped around the cardboard to make a clean line and the nails get hammered into the chair to hold it in place.
Label your pieces!
Next I worked on the arm. Lots and lots of staple removal here.
And the front of the arm had the teeth.
Label your pieces! And don't forget to add them to your list as you take them off so you can work backwards when reassembling.
So you have the cardboard with the teeth and then you just have cardboard. I saved the ones with the teeth to re-use and purchased the cardboard strips without the teeth because it wasn't too expensive and it got really messed up when I was removing all the staples. These strips are the same concept as the one with teeth. They create a clean edge when you pull the fabric down over them. You'll know what I mean if you see this in your own chair your deconstructing.
Keep taking those staples out!
Same with the piping. Just rip it off and remove the staples. I tried to cut the actual cord out of the piping but it was too much work. If you have the patience to do it, you'll save yourself about $0.75 a yard. I deemed that money well spent to save time and just buy new cord.
The teeth!!! They are sharp! Do not step on them! More to come on that!
Oooooooh, we're halfway there, ooooOOOOO Sing it with me!
Take note. See the fabric that is pulled under the arm here? That's actually from the seat. It gets pulled tight and is stapled to the chair below the arm. This is why it's a giant puzzle. You have to reassemble it in such a way that you can pull certain parts through the seat and through the back and staple them. I took a lot of pictures of the process that I'm not posting here. I used them for reference when reassembling.
During this process it's good to have a husband who likes computers and a dog who likes to sleep. They can keep themselves busy while you are becoming a hunchback. A huge cheerwine helps as well.
Gross batting!! Save it. You won't want to because it's gross. Just do it. You'll reuse it.
What did I tell you. Hunchback. Also, please note my feet in use in this picture. Gotta use what you have! That tupperware next to Crosby is full of staples. I went through two of those. You can also see my old dining room chairs in the background. Finishing his project has been on my To Do list for a long time.
Fast forward to sore hands, a hunchback, and dusty lungs and Taaa Daaaa! You've made progress!! At this point you may be delirious and decide that this is actually the look you were going for. Maybe you've decided that you're going to put the shabby in shabby chic and find the perfect lamps and side table to go with this masterpiece you've created. It will sit in your living room just like this and you will walk by and smile at your creation knowing that those blisters on your hands were well worth it.
Snap out of it! You're not done! Eventually, (in my case 2 months later) you will have renewed energy and it's time to recover that sucker!
The piping comes first! Are you scared of piping? Don't be. It's really easy. My fabric had this line along one edge that was entirely khaki. I thought it would give a nice uniform look to my piping so I just cut along that line. You just want to make sure that your strip is wide enough to wrap around the cord and still leave room to sew.
Then, just sew away! I had 7 yards of fabric so I made seven yards of khaki piping.
All of my pieces had been stacked in order. It's a good thing too because I totally lost my list that showed which order to reassemble it. Thank goodness they were labeled!! I laid all of the old pieces out on my new fabric and used those as patterns. Can you see what I did wrong here? I laid my pieces front sides together. Don't do that. You'll create mirror images of the shape you need. (I speak from experience. If if could be done wrong, I did it wrong during this project). My fabric has a bit of a repeating pattern so I did my best to center those medallions on the pieces that would be noticeable (front, back, and seat cushion). I did not stress about it. I don't suggest you stress about it either.
Remember when I told you those teeth are sharp? Be careful where you keep those laying around. I stepped down right on top of one and had two puncture wounds on the bottom of my foot. Please ignore my desperate need for a pedicure and focus on the blood and how brave I was. My dad is a foot doctor and I just recently had my tetanus shot. I figured if it got infected I had already protected myself against lockjaw and my dad was just a phone call away. With those two safety nets I put a sock on and powered on!
Here are all my cut-out pieces laid in place on the chair. Thank goodness for the labels! You'll be thanking me too if you label your pieces. You'll be cursing if you don't. Did you realize there were this many pieces? Also, I challenge you to re-write this post and count how many times you swap the I and the E in pieces. I bet I would win.
This, my friends, is where I fail you and don't have much more for you. I got too into it and didn't have enough hands. Looks like you might be stuck with a fabric-less chair after all. Just kidding. If I figured it out, you can too! I will point out the most difficult part. These guys. The inside wing. You have to use the cardboard strips and the curve of the wing makes it almost impossible. Mine is nowhere near perfect. Also, see those pushpins? Totally unnecessary. This was just a trial and error period when I was figuring out what would work.
It took me four hours to get this far.
And an entire day to finish the rest. My apartment looked like this. Thankfully my husband is not a neat freak by nature and dealt a lot better with this then I would have if it hadn't been my mess.
Oh, here's a good picture of those cardboard strips I was talking about. See it along the top edge? See how I folded the fabric up and over so that just the top edge of the fabric was visible? I then pressed the cardboard strip up tight against the piping and stapled through the cardboard and the fabric.
Then when you pull the fabric back down you have a clean line and the fabric has been stapled in place! Brilliant! You use the teeth strips on the side. That is not as easy.
This post got way out of hand and super long. If you're still reading, bravo to you!! Here's a another look at the final product! It's definitely not perfect but I'm pretty proud of this one. It was not easy and it looks pretty darn good. Better from far away, but still pretty good up close.
