Monday, March 19, 2012

A check off the ole "to-do"s

Was anyone else as unimpressed with last weeks wall quote post? Yeah, sorry, it was uninspired, and I just wanted to post SOMETHING to the Pinterest challenge.

I have something I'm a LOT more excited about, though!


Remember when I did the crappy mock-up, and mentioned that I wanted to reupholster my slipper chairs with a green fabric?

Well..

I DID IT!


I started out with the striped, matchy-matchy chairs from Target

That you can see here.


But... these chairs weren't in the best shape.


I don't really know if that's bananas, but it sounded better than the general "stain" label. And these chairs have been used as a scratching post by my fat cat, so they were scratched up and seams were coming apart because of it. Just.. not pretty..

Come, these curtains that I bought from Goodwill on 1/2 price day.


Yep! Totally changed the look of these chairs for $7. Well, $9, total, but I'll get to the other $2 in a sec.

I reupholstered these using almost the same technique that I'd posted about here. The biggest difference was that I didn't use fabric glue this time. And I left the original fabric on because I didn't have much faith in myself. Wanted to be able to remove everything if it came out looking like crap.

Instead of gluing down the back of the chair and pinning, I bought some metal tack strips from a local upholstery shop for 50 cents each (the other $2 of my $9 makeover). There aren't any pictures of the strips before I wrapped them in fabric because... Well, I have no idea why. These things were scary, and I was sure I was going to impale myself on them... but here are some to give you a picture of what they look like and how they're used.


(do you see the size of those teeth? Torture device!)

So you fold the fabric over the strip, and press the teeth through it



And then you line it up where you you need it to go, and hammer the strip into the chair. In the first picture, I'd cut the strip before hammering... I only did that with the first chair. It really doesn't matter how you do it.


I also sewed the front seams, instead of just folding them like in my first post. To do this, I laid the fabric inside-out on the chair and pinched the fabric right at the corner and pinned. Then I just sewed right where I pinned the fabric.


Resulting in this.


Finally, I was inspired by my pretty new chairs to sew some pillows for them! This pillow was sewn loosely following these directions... (taking like 3 hours!!!!)

And this one is WAY less pretty, and there weren't any directions. I just wanted something LIKE the other one, but not a perfect match. I'll probably end up redoing this one.. Eventually.

And I have to say, it feels SO. GOOD. to have a "big" project checked off the living room to-do list! I figured out which wall color I want for the game board wall, too! So I feel like the living room will be in "after" state before I know it! YAY!

What did YOU do over the weekend? Any furniture make-overs? Paint decisions? New banana stains? :-p

7 comments:

  1. Nice! You should do a video. I'm not grasping the concept of the tack strip. Do you just pull back whatever the tacks are on? I have a friend that wants to recover a wingback chair. I love that pillow with the rosette. Very cute. I'd go with the smeared bananas. You have littles. It's a given.

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    1. I know, I didn't get it when they were explaining it at the upholstery shop! I just had to play with it to get it right. A video would probably have made things clearer.. And definitely would've shown that it wasn't as easy as it seemed typed up!

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  2. Tack strips are not intuitive. When I reupholstered my chair, I only did the last out of six correctly. Pounding them in was fun, though.

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  3. I have the same chair in a not so pretty color and was so happy to find your post! How much fabric do you think I would need to buy? I know you used curtains, but how many yards do you think it took? Thanks!

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  4. Hi Bridget! Thanks for stopping by! I would estimate that it's about three yards per chair. That might be a tad excessive (might get away with two and a half), but the seat, fron and back of the chair seem like about a yard, each (and there's no way my cheap-o curtains were longer than three yards!).

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    1. Thanks so much. I just bought six yards of fabric and am about to start my two chairs today! I hope they turn out as good as yours!

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  5. very good post, i definitely adore this amazing site, persist with it nilkamal chairs

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