Amazing Upholstery Adventure # 3

Just because I haven't written recently about the chair I'm upholstering (with the help - I should say he's doing most of the work, I'm learning - of my Upholstery Guru Rolando), doesn't mean there hasn't been progress. You would hardly recognize Wayne's grandfather's chair. Here are some recent photos:







                              The chair in its underwear:





The chair getting dressed:






 Here's Rolando adding yet more stuffing, even over the underwear. This chair is going to be a nap magnet!!









Here's the chair with half its dress on. Oh my, it's going to be beautiful!

Amazing Upholstery Adventure #2: The naked chair

We finished the first posting of the AUA (Amazing Upholstery Adventure) halfway through deconstruction. Of course, I finally succeeded in stripping all layers of the old upholstery and padding off the chair. In doing so I learned several important things:

• You find various levels of expertise when you deconstruct a chair that has been upholstered and re-upholstered. In my case the top-most layer was done by someone who was not an expert. Although I'm sure it looked good enough - after all it was used for years that way - it was not well done. The upholsterer put the new stuff right over a lot of the old stuff and didn't really know how to nail properly. Many nails were in crooked and/or misplaced on top of one another. They were hard to get out!

• The second (bottom) layer of my chair's upholstery was done by a master. Every nail was placed just as it should be. All the parts that hadn't decayed were intact and I paid close attention to how they were done. When someone years in the future pulls apart the upholstery I'm doing right now, I hope they feel the respect I felt for this person, probably living in the 1800s, who did this expert and careful work. I can only hope mine will be nearly as good.

• I would much rather be using a staple gun, as we do today, than hammering nails, as they did when both the first and the subsequent upholstering were done in the past. What a lot of work! So many nails, and having to pound each one in! Did I mention in the last post - there were hundreds of nails?!

• The original nails used in the first (the expert) upholstery were irregularly shaped, and I believe they were hand-forged. This makes the chair a bit older that we thought, maybe 1860s to 1870s. After all it was Wayne's grandfather's chair, and Wayne's mother was born in 1901, so her father could easily have bought the chair in the 1800s. It may have even been in the family before that. We don't know, but wish we did.

If I was going to spend the money to have a chair upholstered by a professional upholsterer, I would take all the old upholstery off it myself first. This is so much work, it's easy to see why it costs so much to have professional upholstery done. It makes sense that you'd save a lot of money by doing this part yourself.

Here's our chair, naked at last!! What's next in this Adventure?

Amazing Upholstery Adventure 101: Deconstruction!

My friend Rolando, who is a professional upholsterer as well as a fellow-bartender, has agreed to teach me how to upholster a chair. I am totally excited - I've always wanted to learn this skill. It all seems mysterious and difficult - obviously that's why it is so expensive to have someone else do it!

Our project is Wayne's grandfather's chair, a nice old wood armchair whose green damask upholstery is in sad shape. For years, the chair has stood in our bedroom covered with a throw. Now it's going to be liberated!! And beautified! Rolando says it will be easy - we'll see.

My first assignment has been to strip all the old upholstery off the chair. I had no idea how much was involved in this assignment, or how much I would learn from it. First thing I noticed was that hundreds of nails were used in upholstering our chair, and hundreds of nails had to be removed in order to strip it. Literally hundreds! Here's a photo of the seat in deconstruction - that's where I started.

And here's the seat with most of the (broken) webbing off. If you look closely, you can see another piece of broken webbing hanging down behind the right front chair leg. On this seat there was webbing on both the bottom and the top of the burlap cover. Apparently the upholsterer of the green damask left the original webbing underneath and just added new webbing on top.

I learned during this phase of the project that it is always better to remove all the old bits of everything when re-upholstering. Old webbing, for instance, disintegrates over time, although new webbing may last forever because of updated materials. Most chairs you will re-upholster have old webbing, but how can you be sure? Take it all off! All old chairs have cotton stuffing with the potential for bacteria and other undesirables in it. How can you be sure? Take it all off!

More to follow on My Amazing Upholstery Adventure soon!!

I learned something new today

I'm always amazed when I learn things (finally) that are so basic, it's hard to imagine why I didn't learn them before. There's the problem with the duvet on our bed always slipping off toward the foot end of the bed. And the problem of the duvet itself moving around within the duvet cover, so that it eventually all wants to bunch up at the foot end of the bed, with no duvet up by your neck where you need it. Gravity, no doubt, and also why the whole thing tends to slip off the bed.

Even worse, Wayne and I are always tugging the duvet up because we're cold, so not only do we wake up several times a night to do this, but every morning I have to re-make the bed from scratch because it's all torn up. Annoying.

Some time ago, I read of an easy way to get the duvet cover on and I said to myself, "AHA! The next time I change the duvet cover, I'm going to do this."  It was a simple thing, just reach in to the far corners and more-or-less turn the cover inside out. Then grasp the corners of the duvet and cover together, or tie the duvet in, and let the cover turn itself right side out over the duvet as you shake it a bit, holding on to those corners.

The words "tie the duvet in" stuck with me as a possible solution to the Other Problem, the one of slippage. Today I changed the duvet cover and resolved to sew ties in the inside corners of the clean cover and onto the corners of the duvet and "tie them in". I cut some cotton tape for ties. When I reached in to get the corners of the clean cover and turn it inside out, I felt ties. Hmmmph. Well, I'll be darned. Then I looked at the duvet itself, and there on all four corners were little tabs, exactly what you'd want to attach those ties to. I've had this duvet for at least ten years, and they'd been there all the time.

I felt pretty stupid, but also pretty excited. All problems solved. And when I got the original duvet cover out of the dryer, I checked it out. It too had ties. I learned something new today!

Leash runner

I've never had a dog. I mean a pet dog. We had farm dogs when I was growing up on the farm. They stayed outside and frequently got hit by cars because they ran on the road. They weren't pets; I don't remember a single one's name.

On the other hand, I've almost always had cats. Nero is my current sweetie, a big beautiful black feral kitty with hair like a bear's. Imagine my surprise to find myself out in a field with about 2000 dogs, in Morgan Hill, CA, last week Thursday. Nero would have been horrified, but of course he wasn't there.

 I was in Morgan Hill, which is about 70 miles south of Oakland, to see my high school friend Lynne. Lynne loves dogs and is very much involved in dog agility training. She was there to be a judge at national dog agility trials, and I was there to spend a few hours with her. She lives in Vermont, so obviously we don't get to see each other very often.

Lynne had to work soon after I arrived, so she said "Want a job?"

"Sure," I said. After all, anything is more fun than just standing around watching, particularly if the only person you know has to work.

Before I knew it, I had become a leash runner. Did you ever read the book Kite Runner? Well, it's something like the kids who would run after kites, rescuing them from trees and bushes, and bring them back to be flown again. In this case, when the dog was ready to perform his agility work, the trainer threw his leash on the ground and directed him to start. I would wait until the dog was no longer looking in my direction, on this course between the 2nd and 3rd jump, and then I'd walk over and pick up the leash - no actual running, as the dog might decide to run after me and his leash rather than finish his jumps - and then carry it over to where the course ended. That way, when he and his trainer arrived at the last jump, the leash would be there and ready.

I got pretty good at it, Lynne said. And even better, we had a fun few hours afterward wandering around cute little downtown Morgan Hill, drinking wine, eating wonderful Italian food, and catching up on our lives. A really fun day, and I learned a new skill!