• Hi all and welcome to TheWoodHaven2 brought into the 21st Century, kicking and screaming! We all have Alasdair to thank for the vast bulk of the heavy lifting to get us here, no more so than me because he's taken away a huge burden of responsibility from my shoulders and brought us to this new shiny home, with all your previous content (hopefully) still intact! Please peruse and feed back. There is still plenty to do, like changing the colour scheme, adding the banner graphic, tweaking the odd setting here and there so I have added a new thread in the 'Technical Issues, Bugs and Feature Requests' forum for you to add any issues you find, any missing settings or just anything you'd like to see added/removed from the feature set that Xenforo offers. We will get to everything over the coming weeks so please be patient, but add anything at all to the thread I mention above and we promise to get to them over the next few days/weeks/months. In the meantime, please enjoy!

Chairs - Done!

That sounds - and looks - like a really smart move, getting the professional input when needed, but having the chairs still all your own work.
 
Excellent Nick. The tutorial is useful I may see if we feel up to doing it ourselves or still go to an upholsterer. However I need to finish the chairs first!
 
Yes very useful tutorial.
With your skills I believe you could be as good as a professional upholsterer in no time.
Air staplers are not expensive and well worth getting one, which is what I did when I made up a bunch of acoustic panels
 
They look superb Nick. I don't think it would have occurred to me to try doing upholstery myself. It sounds like the short course was well worth it. I'd be overjoyed to be able to make something like that and have it in the house and you should be proud of them.
 
Years back when local authorities ran adult education evening classes my father attended a weekly evening class to learn how to upholster 2 “antique” ballon back chairs. He spent many years after slowly going around every chair in his house, my house, my brothers, house and a few more besides reupholstering everything in sight.
It’s a useful skill to have but you unless you’ve got time on your hands you may want to keep it a secret.
 
AndyP said:
Somewhere between steps 4-6 may I suggest you pencil mark top and bottom? perhaps even with cross hatching to indicate the edge to be round over.
And don't forget he, or she, who never made a mistake never made anything
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Spotty coloured dots are even better! - Rob
 
I upholstered two more chairs this afternoon and took some more photos of the calico stage where the shaping is done.

This is the calico loosely tacked to the seat. You can see the edges are still square:

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With a bit more tension added, you can see the 'domed' shape starting to form:

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This is with the right tension but still with temporary staples which is why there are some bumps visible on the front edge:

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Temporary staples get replaced with the permanent ones:

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Starting the corners:

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Corners finished (excuse the uneven stapling - I blame it on the electric stapler being harder to use! It'll never be seen.):

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The final shape:

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And with the underneath trimmed:

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Four down, two to go:

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The last bit of upholstery was to add some black material underneath to cover any fraying ends etc. It's just folded underneath itself and stapled in place. 3 staples at the front, then 3 at the back adding tension. Then 3 on one side and 3 on the other. Then it's just a case of working either side of centre, front to back and side to side and round and round until you get to the corners. Apparently you can buy black staples but that seemed unnecessary and I'm too impatient to wait for them anyway!

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So that's it. Done.

Here are some photos of the chairs in their final position...

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I might open a celebratory bottle of wine for our first supper using the chairs this evening. :)
 

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Fantastic, Nick, really wonderful.

When I made mine, I was going blind*, so I would have had difficulty doing the upholstery, even if I had had the skills. But I have a friend who is a retired uphosterer and he did it for me. Unfortunately I didn't explain well enough what I wanted, so the result is that my seats are fairly flat, whereas yours are rather more domed, which I think looks much better.

I hope that when the day comes for my chairs to need reupholstering, the person who owns them then makes a better decicion than I did.
S

*I'm not blind any more!
 
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Brilliant from start to finish. Congratulations and many thanks for sharing all the details along the way. 👏👏👏👏
 
Fantastic, Nick, well done. That's a long old job, properly ticked off. Great WIP, too, letting us follow along in detail.
 
Hey Nick regarding your saying that the garden gate build 2019 was your first woodworking adventure , I am really impressed with your table and chair project. Lets just say I am amazed at your quality of work. Keep in mind this is coming from a hack carpenter. I have learned a lot from your WIP , looking for more.
 
duke said:
Hey Nick regarding your saying that the garden gate build 2019 was your first woodworking adventure , I am really impressed with your table and chair project. Lets just say I am amazed at your quality of work. Keep in mind this is coming from a hack carpenter. I have learned a lot from your WIP , looking for more.
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That's very kind thank you. I have had the luxury over the past few years of being able to put a LOT of time into this (for me) hobby.
 
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