reupholstering a chair takes forever.

This summer I decided to learn how to reupholster. I realized very quickly a few things: 1. Just because I learn how to reupholster this chair doesn't mean that those skills will transfer to another chair 2. Reupholstering is slow work.
I found this chair at a garage sale for $4. It seemed sturdy and comfy and cheap, so if it didn't work out, hey it was only $4, no big deal.

First we measured. Oh, if only I'd known what I was doing when I picked this chair! It's so huge. I measured and we determined that it would take 12 yards of fabric! 12 yards! For those of you who know nothing about fabric, upholstery fabric is about $10 and up per yard. I was planning on selling this chair or giving it away, but now I couldn't figure out who would buy this chair for $124+labor costs. I went to Denver fabrics and-it was a miracle!-found fabric for $1.00 per yard. It's a little strange-it's got monkeys and fish, but I liked the colors and frankly for $12, I couldn't pass it up. 

But I'm getting ahead of myself. The covering with fabric doesn't come until the chair has been stripped-staple by staple by staple. 

Once inside, we determined that it was a pretty good chair-filthy, with candy wrappers, dog fur and sunflower seeds, but still a solid chair. 

The next step in reupholstering-after stripping it of basically everything-depends on what part you're doing. We weaved (wove?) some band thingies in the seat for stability, put in this super soft cotton and covered it with something called  dacron (if you have tactile issues, you will HATE this stuff). Then we cover it with muslin. Thanks to Project Runway, I knew what this was! Spread and smooth, spread and smooth then staple. Check out this staple gun that I'm using:

I asked the instructor if she ever had the urge to take the staple gun and just spray staples into the wall. She said no (but I definitely wanted to do that). 

On to spreading and smoothing the fabric. here are the arms:

Finally it's starting to look like a chair. And this has taken days to get to just this point. 

Finally, the seat is re-covered:

See the fabric? Not so bad for $1 per yard. So much work has gone into this chair, though, I'm starting to wonder which piece of furniture currently in my house will end up in the garage to make room for this chair. Partly because I'm working so hard on it and partly because I know this is a quality chair.

Later this week I will continue to work slowly at finishing this chair.