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.
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.
Next up, making it pretty with new fabric.
French Style Chair Part One - Removing the fabric
French Style Chair Part Two - Painting & waxing the frame
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