French Style Chair - Upholstering - Chalking Up Success!

French Style Chair - Upholstering is part three of this makeover series. I decided to replace the original wadding I had removed from this little French style chair during the first stage of this project: removing the fabric.

In order to save costs, I ended up using a sheet of foam I had left over from another project. The foam was quite thin so I just doubled up the layers until I was happy with the padding height.

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French Style Chair - Upholstering

Making Templates

I started with the chair back and if you read stage one removing the fabric you will remember that I kept the old pieces of fabric to use as templates for cutting out the new pieces. I just laid out the old pieces on top of the foam, pinned them down with tacking pins and cut around them. You can either use a pair of sharp scissors for this or a fabric cutting wheel whichever works best for you. I have both and tend to use whichever seems to suit the fabric.

For the back, I cut out four layers of foam and two layers of plain cotton batting (using the templates I had labelled ‘backrest front' and ‘backrest back'). Next, I sandwiched the foam layers inside the two pieces of batting and roughly tacked the whole lot together to form the back cushion.

Foam suppliers: EU/UK | USA

Cotton batting (Calico) suppliers: EU/UK | USA

Attaching the cushions

NOTE: When I removed the original fabric, I saw that each piece had been stapled separately to the chair frame. I wanted to reduce the number of staples which is why I decided to sew all the layers together first.

I measured the width of the new padded cushion for the back to find the middle. Then, using my staple gun, I used one staple to fix the middle of the cushion to the middle of the chair back in the frame.

Then I pulled the cushion taught and stapled the middle of the bottom edge of the cushion to the middle of the bottom end of the frame.

Next, I did the same with each side, each time pulling the fabric taught.

Finally, starting from the top again, I started filling in with staples all around the edge of the cushion to secure it in place.

I used the same process for the seat, using four layers of the thin foam and one layer of the plain cotton to go over the top. Again, I roughly tacked these together using a needle and thread before using the exact same process to staple the cushion to the seat.

As I explained earlier, the padding on the arms was good enough to keep. I just used the original fabric pieces templates to cut out two pieces of plain cotton and stapled these over the padding.