I’ve just finished my annual three-day upholstery summer school and I am once again buzzing with ideas, motivation and enthusiasm.
Summer School 2017
Beginner
How to: cleaning rusty springs
The round backed Spanish chair I am working on at the moment has a sprung seat and when I stripped it back I found 7 springs that looked very much worse for wear.
How to: Webbing
I am quite brief in my descriptions of the actual process of reupholstering items. If I broke everything down every time I would end up writing a whole book and besides, I am firmly a believer that if you would like to learn how to do this, you should go to a class. However, when I was first starting out, I struggled to find any kind of materials online to remind me what my teacher had said, without it being a high speed video of someone with a staple gun. Staple guns have their place, but traditional upholstery does not use them and that’s why I try not to either.
PSA: Wear Safety Specs!
Remember at school, when you were carrying out some innocuous activity or another, and your teacher made you wear those awful plastic safety googles that were horribly uncool, blurred your vision and made it harder to finish you task? If you were lucky you got safety glasses that were slightly less awful. You only wore them when the teacher was looking and pushed them up on top of your head the rest of the time.
Laura’s Maternity Chair
As I got closer to finishing the piano stool, my mind started to wander to my next project. Eventually, moaning vocally to enough people paid off and I was offered a maternity chair by a friend in my dance class. I’d never heard of a maternity chair before and when I first saw it I actually laughed out loud. It is so tiny! I can’t imagine any pregnant woman managing to get into the chair, and if she did, would definitely never get out again. Apparently it’s from days gone by when people had nurseries and nannies. The chair was for the nanny to sit in so that she was at the same level as the children.