I Reupholstered a Chair
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I bought this chair for $15 from a thrift store three years ago, with the intention of reupholstering it, because it was in need of a lot of love.
The chair itself is I’d say at least 100 years old, made of solid wood that will last at least another 100 years, and it was originally stuffed with straw! I kept that original stuffing in there.
I filmed the whole entire process of taking all the old upholstery off the chair, and adding the new upholstery and decorative ribbon on, but when I went to put the video together, I discovered that I had a problem.
Somewhere over the past three years, every last minute of my reupholstering footage vanished into the land of lost footage – close relative of the land of lost socks – and out of my life forever.
At first I decided to just scrap the story, because how can a story be told with only half of the footage?
But the creative side of me decided to make the loss of all that film time into a challenge. I would find a fun and crafty way to complete the story, that would be much more entertaining than all of the filming that I had done.
So that’s where this story came from.
Removing all of the old upholstery was a very dirty and kind of gross task. This obviously wasn’t the first time the chair was reupholstered, but it had been years since it had been done, and things were very crusty and crumbly underneath.
The original straw stuffing had a special feel to it and I felt like it needed to remain with the chair, so I threw away the crumbliest bits of stuffing, and cleaned up and kept the rest.
It took me a while to find upholstery that I liked, but I eventually settled on this green color, with a gold ribbon to act as trim.
I bought an electric staple gun, to save my hands, and a mini glue gun and got to work.
I had saved the old upholstery to use as pattern pieces, so I laid those out on the fresh new upholstery, and cut out each piece to size.
I then stapled the new pieces of fabric into place, and then hot glued a piece of ribbon on top - like this one single picture that I have, shows.
I didn’t bother with refinishing the wood at all. I kind of like that the scratches show its age and the former lives its lived.
The whole project was pretty easy and very rewarding, and now I’ve had a super sturdy antique chair in my life for the past three years!
Hi, I’m Kristen!
I envision a world where you and I rediscover what it is to be human, through connection with ourselves, each other and the natural world around us.