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Time to tackle Chloe's chair! First step was to remove all the old fabric and those hundreds of nail tacks. Beneath the fabric, there was foam on the seat, back, front, and arms, which I'll be reusing. The seat of the chair was made of some leather straping over a muslin fabric. The back of the chair was made of two pieces of foam with a piece of cardboard sandwiched between them. Though the muslin is stained and a bit loose, the straping is still fairly taut and the cardboard is still nice and hard so I'm planning to just leave them all in place rather than remove and replace. So it looks like I can reuse everything; the only new parts will be the fabrics.
As I posted before, the part I was most worried about was how to do the actual tacking of the nails. Katie had a great suggestion for me - use flexible tacking strip instead. Flexgrip, also known as curvease or ply-grip, is a flexible strip with little metal teeth that grip onto the fabric. It makes finishing edges and working around curves very easy. I found mine at the Mississauga Fabricland location which carries upholstery supplies.
With the chair stripped bare, (and this youtube video to guide me) I decided to test drive the flexgrip and see if I could do it myself. I cut a piece the length of the front of the seat. Using the original nail tacks, I nailed the strip, following the curve of the front. You can see I wasn't that precise with this test and some of the metal overhung the edge.
Once the metal was in place, I folded the back of the metal strip forward leaving a 1/4" gap. Then I put the foam back in place and wrapped the old fabric on top. Using a screwdriver, I tucked the edge of the fabric into the gap all along the strip. Finally, I used a rubber mallet to lightly tap the flexgrip down and close the gap.
And tada - here's how the flexgrip test turned out:
Not bad :) For the real thing, I'll have to install the flexgrip back from the wood edge and bring the foam and fabric forward so that I get a nice curved cushion and no metal parts pinching baby bums! We've put a coat of primer on the chair and should have all the paint and reupholstery done in the next few days. The colour we ended up choosing is so yummy I could eat the chair up!
So recovering Chloe's chair is going to be a bit harder than I thought. When we found the chair at the garage sale, the lady selling it said it was a 'true reproduction chair from Williamsburg'. Not sure what that meant at the time but now I realize it means I'm going to be saying a lot of #!*&'s and %@!*'s with this project.
See how nice and tight the fabric is pulled into the wood frame? Looks like quality work, right? Usually, at least with more modern upholstered chairs, reupholstering is as easy as popping off the seat or back insert and stapling on a new fabric. Like you see here. You can cover any 'rough edges' or mistakes with gimp trim or piping. Oh, if it only were that easy! With this chair, this is what you see when you remove the fabric and foam insert:
Whoa. Yes, that is a hundred little individual nail holes driven into the chair and a spooky piece of fabric ready to eat me alive. This is how it works:- a piece of material is cut slightly larger than the size of the area to be covered, leaving a small "seam allowance"
- the seam allowance is about 1/2" all the way around. Keeping the nice side of the material down, the allowance is folded in and individual nails are put from the inside and poke out of the material
- the piece of foam goes into the space at the back of the chair- starting with one nail, you keep the seam allowance folded towards the chair and individually hammer each nail into the wood.
Confused enough? Scared? Yeah, so am I!
So this is just ONE part of the chair... the front, the seat, and the two tiny arms need to be recovered too. And another little treat: it looks like there is real strapping or webbing underneath the seat. We haven't taken the seat off yet but that's what it feels like and I'm not sure that will be even more problematic.
Not sure if I'm cut out to be a chair reupholster, folks! This little chair has got me more nervous than the first time I used the router! There's a whole lot o' things that can go wrong, like I ruin or tear the fabric (it looks like it needs to be stretched pretty tight) or I manage to get the fabric on - but its crooked (what possessed me to get plaid AND stripes?!) or I damage the wood or the painted finish while trying to get the nails in.
ARGH!! Ok, since it would likely cost me an arm and a leg to get this professionally recovered (if I can even find a reupholster experienced in this traditional way), I'm going to have to trod on. I think I'll try it first with a scrap piece of fabric and see how that goes... unless anyone has any other suggestions?? I'm just hoping I can get this chair done before Chloe outgrows it!
to this 
and finally this:
