Driving home on a council cleanup weekend, we came across a delapidated chaise thrown out on the side of the road. It was covered in
reconstituted leather which had long since perished and delaminated. Anyway, having accomplished a couple of upholstery projects by now I thought I'd take it home and restore it - how hard could it be ?
This is the result. But I learnt something about upholstery. Most of the endless number of re-upholstery jobs you see on Youtube are done on timber framed furniture - which is really rather easy because you just stretch and staple. This is different - its steel framed, so not much to staple too and nothing to stretch against. Instead its like sewing up a gigantic sock, and stretching it over the frame. The 'sock' has to be very precisely sewn, otherwise you will get wrinkles everywhere.
Now I am starting to see the value in making steel framed furniture. The problem with timber framed furniture is that it tends to be boxy because timber joinery techniques don't lend themselves well to making organic shapes. It can be done, but its slow and I find myself not very confident in the robustness of the finished joint. I had previously started doing a chaise lounge to my own design but abandoned it after endless hours of trying to interpret a complex shape into timber. With steel its just cut, bend, weld - surely.
I actually recovered this item 5 times to get it this far. I didnt mind doing 5 because I was learning a lot, but the cost was working out a bit much. It doesnt look it in the photo but its actually covered in a thick royal blue velvet.
I should really be doing one more version as its still not quite perfect, but I think its time to move on.
After about version number 2 I realised the only way to do this one is to treat the frame like a tailors dummy, and pin and tack-stitch the cover over it, taking it off from time to time to machine-stitch a fairly large segment, and then refitting it.
I'm enjoying doing the upholstery. I can spend time alone in the shed producing furniture for our house without something trying to cut my fingers off or filling my lungs up with dust. As we are moving to rental accommodation for 6 months or maybe a year I will need something to do while my tools and machines remain in storage.
I expect most of you will have worked out I'm mainly just posting this to keep the board alive.
cheers
Arron
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