Finished!

It's been a while since I posted... but I've been working on the chair all week.

The first task: covering buttons. Thirteen of them.

You can kind of get a general sense for what my apartment has looked like during this process in this photo....

this is my tiny little dining room table covered in upholstery supplies and tools : hammer, staple gun, fabric, (cell phone), and the button covering kit I picked up at Jo-Anne Fabrics. It's pretty neat, actually -- you put the fabric circle and button top into this little plastic dish, then use another plastic piece (and the flat side of the a staple gun, in my case) to push the back on. When all is said and done, you have:

BUTTONS! I thought about trying to match the pattern up to where the button would be on the chair, but instead just made a variety, in hopes that I could at least match some of them closely enough that I didn't have a white button in the middle of a big green flower. And somehow, I actually did pretty well! The patterns aren't exacty, but the ratio of color on the button to color at it's placement is generally pretty good. :) I'm just that fantastic :) haha.




But threading buttons was interesting... good thing I picked up some giant needles while I was at Jo-Anne!!!


After all the buttons were threaded, I pulled the back and seat fabric taut and busted out my new friend, the staple gun (which isn't QUITE powerful enough to put staples all the way into the hardwood frame, so I kept a hammer handy at all times).


So with the entire inside upholstered, it was time to bring out my pewter-finished tacks...... and let me tell you, those things SUCK.



Ok, I lied. They're pretty awesome, but it's a lot harder than you'd think to get those effers perfectly lined up, while also getting gimp (this curly ribbon kind of stuff to cover the edge of the fabric) to actually cover the edge of the fabric.
Although it looks fine from afar, a professional upholsterer would probably be appalled by my tacking skills!!!

I had to put on the side batting and fabric as well halfway through tacking, since they needed to be tacked in as well.... this whole upholstery thing is getting easier, I think.

OK, I lied again, because the absolute trickiest part of this WHOLE project is putting on the final piece -- the back. There's these metal bars with nails in them that I had to re-use from the old upholstery -- i had to straighten out a few tacks and get the bars nails into the fabric in exactly the right place so that it stretched right across the back... plus I had to staple the top of the fabric in kind of upsidedown -- and the curves made it hard to get it right.
The back piece is FAR from perfect -- the only real success was that I managed to keep rust residue from staining the new fabric orange. But it looks alright and does the trick.
Last thing to do was stretch a peice of fabric to cover my chair's girly parts (ie, springs and burlap which shed dust and lord-knows-what when you sit on the chair). Cheap muslin did the trick pretty well (since I couldn't find cambric, which is traditionally used for this purpose.)

(as an aside, i struck nearly the same pose at the doc office today...... had to get a colposcopy after an abnormal pap smear :( not so much fun. finishing the chair -- despite the frustrating back peice -- was the highlight of my day)





AND SO WE HAVE:

A beautiful, finished green and white and wood chair.

Yay!!!!!!!

But of course......

now I need an ottoman to match.....


;)