During the last visit to Kempton, I bought this chair to reupholster:
While stripping it down, I found it was stuffed with a mixture of hay and hair. I kept the hair in a plastic bag meaning to clean it and reuse it, and there it has stayed ever sitnce.
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.
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.
Nanny was not a person I ever met. She was employed as a nanny for my grandfather when he was a small boy in the late 40s and 50s. Eventually he grew up and she went to work for another family but once she retired, she came back to live with him and his own family. She had a suite of two armchairs and a sofa in her little cottage. Continue reading
Somewhere between finishing Laura’s maternity chair and starting on Nanny’s armchair, I started to think about doing paid reupholstery commissions. I mentioned this to a few people and was offered an old stuffover chair to have a go at. I call it the doll’s house chair because of its interesting back story. It was designed and built by William Lendon Prosser. He worked for Maples in London and was asked to make some chairs for Queen Mary’s Doll’s House. I had a look at the website and found some chairs in the king’s bedroom that look very similar.