A Re-upholstering Virgin No More!

That's right. I re-upholstered my first piece of furniture.

I've been wanting to cover a chair I've had for a couple years with different fabric and because of its construction, it didn't require that I remove the previous fabric. It only needed a slip-cover, which I knew I could handle.

This mis-matched pair is currently residing in the corner of the random room off the family room. My craft desk is in here right now, but someday when we buy a house, I'll have a room all to myself, with a door to lock the kiddos out and everything! Come on, you know you dream of the same thing hee hee!

The rocker is nice and neutral, although a bit boring. But you can't beat it for rocking babies to sleep!

The purple chair is the one I wanted to change. Now, don't get me wrong, I still like this fabric and I love the tufting. It'll be great in the girls' room someday but for now purple flowers don't exactly go with anything in my house.

I was originally going to cover it with canvas drop cloth as Miss Mustard Seed does so beautifully but I ended up using the one I had for other projects. Then I remembered I had a couple remnant pieces of blue stripe ticking that I thought would look good. So I started draping and sewing and loved it.

Here's how it turned out:

While sewing, the fabric had to be taken off and put back on the chair quite a bit so it helped that the ticking had a bit of stretch in it. And while it's certainly not perfect, for my first time re-upholstering anything, I'm pretty happy with the results.

The hardest parts were the corners of the chair back and where the back and the seat meet.

See? A bit messy but I couldn't figure out any other way of doing it although I'm sure it exists.

With the remaining pieces of ticking left I made two pillows with coordinating blue floral fabric that I've had for awhile and needed to use.

When it was time to secure the cover to the bottom I simply folded the fabric under and stapled around the legs. Not very well, but who cares? When was the last time a house guest turned your chairs over to inspect the bottom? Exactly.

I wanted to do as little damage to the chair as possible so this method worked for me. Again, probably not the right way but I'm still learning.

The stretchiness made it hard to get the stripes perfectly straight when stapling but I don't mind imperfections. You can see a little wave in the seat and back.

Maybe if I had picked a different pattern or a solid I wouldn't have encountered this problem but I have a serious thing for stripes. They are all over my house.

I'm excited to finally have this project under my belt. Within the next few weeks I'm going to be painting a friends' bedroom set she bought off craigslist. Hopefully I have read enough blogs and tutorials on painting furniture not to screw it up! I'll let you know whether I'm a success or an epic fail at painting. Wish me luck!

Linking to:
Furniture Feature Friday with Miss Mustard Seed
Perfectly Imperfect