in the middle of it all

Quite literally in the middle of April, the ides so to speak, and in the midst of the legislative season, this got done.

I started this a hilariously long time ago, 6 months or so. Much to my surprise I haven't had the luxury of time to sew during this fellowship. (I can't decide if that's sarcastic or not.) I will admit, part of the reason was that I hadn't brought my iron up with me and I just couldn't see finger pressing all the seams I needed to get this done. I have since bought a lovely NEW iron and finished this in an afternoon. 

I was originally thinking of hand quilting to outline each of the navy stars, but settled on quilting a grid in orange thread instead. I'm glad I did because it ended up adding a bit of a 3D optical illusion to the stars that I like very much. I set my machine on the longest stitch it would let me do, so it ends up looking like unusually tidy hand quilting, anyway. 

I even conquered my reticence to install zippers! This orange zipper simply pops on the back, and much to Dave's relief means the pillow is actually DONE. (I may or may not have had other pillows to sew closed that stayed that way for …. a while.) It's living happily on my bed/couch now. Score one for Sacramento sewing!

I'm still reupholstering a chair.

Once the chair was stripped, we used the old fabric pieces as patterns to cut out our new fabric. Instead of making the bottom out of several mitered panels the way it was originally done, I just cut out one big piece of fabric, draped it over the whole bottom of the chair, and wrapped it like a present. I did 90 degree 'hotel corners' at the front to deal with the extra fabric, and as a bonus I now know a new way to make my bed.

By the end of the night (11:30 or so) we had the bulk of the chair recovered. This was the point where Dave got to sit back and relax, because I did all the cutting and sewing. Though he did take the piping out of the original casing and also got me to stop stressing out about the fit of the back not looking perfect before we actually stapled anything down. I was pretty amazed at how the whole thing took shape really nicely once we started fixing everything to the frame. Pinching, shoving, pulling, it was all fair game and went really quickly!

The only part we didn't manage to get done that first day was putting the back panel back on. The irony of the situation was that the arms are attached with bolts. Despite the sheer number of sockets we have to go with our socket wrench, and even that Dave asked if he should bring them up (jokingly….), our socket wrench was happily down in Palo Alto. Dave tried valiantly to reattach the arms using the pliers we had on hand, he did in fact get them off that way, but no dice. We called it a night and decided we wouldn't be sitting on the chair until we could tighten the bolts properly.

I had a three-day weekend, but Dave was back at work on Monday. I took advantage of my free day to tackle the cushion. Having sewn lots of pillows by this point, making the cushion was a breeze. I opted not to include the piping in the replaced cover partly out of laziness but also because I think it looks better without. I did manage to reinstall the zipper properly and got everything sewn together uneventfully. The cushion was basically a top and bottom piece sewn onto a continuous strip that serves as the sides. I did notice that since I sewed the top and bottom on in different directions (clockwise, counter clockwise) that the cushion has a little bit of a 'slant' to it, but I think that I'm the only person that is ever going to see that when looking at it. I was just so impressed I got the zipper back on and the cushion in it that I'm willing to overlook that tiny detail. 

So after Day 2 of reupholstery we have a chair that could totally pass as done when put in the corner! You can't even see the fact that there's no back or bottom panels. Plus, don't sit in it, you might end up on the floor! Still, this is pretty much what it's going to look like even if the final touches aren't quite done yet…. part 3: the finale coming soon.

I'm reupholstering a chair.

I've got this chair. It's been around quite a while and the cats (Jack, mostly) have really done a number on it over the years. The back panel has been hammered back on more than once, and the fabric at the corners looks like the silks on corn. It ended up being one of the pieces of furniture that came with me up to Sacramento on the condition that I would redo it to fit in with whatever decor I ended up with, because yellow and brown certainly wasn't going to be it. I found some classy looking brown and gray tweedy upholstery fabric at Joann's on the clearance table (for like 4 bucks a yard…. serious bargain) and it's been sitting in the corner with the chair ever since I moved up here.

So, last weekend I bit the bullet and started. By 'I' I mean 'we' and by 'we' I mean Dave and me. Neither Dave nor I have ever really done this before, but we figured oh what the heck how bad can it be. Let's have fun with it this weekend! Well…… I could definitely see how folks less stubborn than us would have stopped midway and just bought a new chair. We actually did end up having quite a bit of fun together, but we both agree that we would think long and hard before doing it again.

Dave took copious amounts of photos as we deconstructed so we could remember how to put everything back together. I think taking them forced us to actually stop and think about how everything was put on so we didn't really refer to them later, but I'd say even if you don't end up using them, having them is a good back up.

The other important thing to keep in mind is to be nice to the fabric. I made sure to label all of the fabric pieces as we took them off and we resisted the urge to just rip things off before looking at how it was attached. Even then, there was no ripping because I wanted to use the old pieces as patterns for the new ones.

The number of staples in this chair holding everything on was astonishing. And we pulled out every. single. one. By the end of just the bottom of the chair both Dave and I were pretty sore in our hands and shoulders from wrestling with the tiny pieces of steel. We soldiered through, though, and were rewarded by a stripped down chair by the early evening (we started at 11 am). After which we took an Advil/dinner break. More on stage 2 in the next post...