The Un-Caned Chair

A while back I acquired this chair at a thrift store. I liked the lines of it and knew it could look really cool with new upholstery, so I took it home and let it sit in my dining room all winter. At this point, that shouldn’t be a surprise to you.

I have to admit that I twinge a bit when I watch people remove cane from furniture and replace it with upholstery. It seems like they do it with such enthusiasm, like cane is this terrible trend in furniture that we need to remove from antiques across the country. I think part of the reason for the slow extinction of cane furniture is that, at least most of the time, the cane is damaged, and few people know how to replace it. I realize that this is kind of an unreasonable rant about cane furniture, but humor me for a minute. My grandpa knew how to weave cane furniture and often repaired chairs for friends. My grandparents’ house was full of cane chairs, and I associate that craft strongly with my interest in refinishing furniture. So to remove cane from a piece almost seems sacrilegious to me.

But, I am a heathen and so I replaced the cane on this point chair with upholstery. *GASP*. I know, I feel guilty, but hear me out. There are two ways to apply cane to furniture. One is by weaving the cane yourself through holes in the seat, and the other is by using pre-woven cane that you shove into a crevice. Based on the technique used on the chair, the replacement technique will be different. Well, my grandpa was really good at the actual cane weaving, but I don’t remember seeing a ton of furniture in their house that used the newer technique, so I didn’t feel as bad replacing the cane with upholstery. Plus, getting the cane out of the crevice was going to take forever, this chair didn’t seem worth the effort.

To makeover this chair, I first removed the seat by unscrewing it from underneath the chair. Then I removed the cane by running my flathead screwdriver through the holes and ripping the cane close to the frame. Once I had removed the cane piece, I took pliers and removed as much of the cane left over as I could. I knew it didn’t have to be perfect because fabric wouald be over it.

 I decided to paint this chair because the shiny look of the finish made it look a little too 80s for my taste, and I didn't have the patience to refinish it after my last chair refinishing endeavor. So I took my chair down to the basement where I sanded it with 80 grit sandpaper, getting it nice and scuffed up. I decided to spray it with a light coat of primer outside because I planned to paint the chair white and didn’t want the wood to bleed through. I also wanted to make sure that the paint bonded to the still a little bit shiny frame. I guess I forgot to take a picture of this step in my haste.

Once the primer was dry, I brushed on two coats of Glidden flat paint in Picket by Martha Stewart. While the paint was drying, I took apart the old seat cushion and found a gross piece of foam completely falling apart. Yuck. I also found a ton of staples in the wood seat, which I used my screwdriver and pliers to remove. Luckily the Christmas Attic uses lots of staples to hang things in their store, so I had plenty of experience removing staples. It took quite a bit of work to get the wood seat clean, but I got it done.

At this point it was late on Sunday night, so I let the paint dry overnight and hung out with the boy for a while.

The next morning I used some 80 grit sandpaper to distress the edges of the chair. I used a cloth to dust off the chair and then brushed a coat of Minwax Polycrylic over the entire chair. I let the chair dry while I was at work and got back to it when I came home in the evening.

Then came the upholstery. This was my first try at upholstering something with a picture back, so it took longer than I had hoped, but that always seems to be the case when I’m learning a new technique. Again, I used instructions I found on Design*Sponge to upholster the back, except I only used layers of Dacron instead of foam because the foam was just too poufy for this chair. I used my parents’ electric stapler to attach all the layers. It sucked. No matter how hard I tried to keep the staple gun straight, the staple went in sideways. I finished off half a box of staples and had to go to the store to get more. And after I thought I was finished, I realized that somehow the pattern wasn’t quite straight, so I had to fix it a little the next day. So a recommendation for you: If this if your first try, I recommend using a floral or something more abstract that is forgiving in terms of pattern placement.

Upholstering the seat was much easier. Notice that this seat has a hole in the base. I didn’t really want to cut a new piece of wood, so I used another set of instructions I found on Design Sponge to attach some new furniture webbing to the wood base. Then I added a thick piece of foam and then covered the foam and seat in Dacron, stapling on the underside of the seat. I made sure not to obscure any of the holes for the screws to attach the seat back to the frame.

Next I cut a piece of fabric for the seat, made sure I lined it up centered, and stapled it in place. I improvised a bit with the back, which had room cut out for the back of the chair.

Finally it was time to sew my cording. I used this tutorial from Centsational Girl to make my double welt cord for the back of the chair. Double welt cord is great because it hides all the imperfections of the staples. Sewing the cord was easy, but a bit time consuming. I also didn’t have a zipper foot, so the cord is a little wider than normal. That was fine by me. Once I had finished the double welt cord, I attached it to the chair with a hot glue gun. Then I sewed a single welt cord and attached it to the bottom of the chair with a glue gun. I screwed the seat back onto the frame, and my masterpiece was done.

Voila! It reminds me of something from Ballard Designs. I might keep it, I might sell it, I might save it for the Lucketts Spring Market. We shall see.

Linked to: Savvy Southern Style, Mom 4 Real, My Repurposed Life, Someday Crafts, The Shabby Creek Cottage, Redoux, The Shabby Nest, Making Lemonade, Simple Home Life, Domestically Speaking, Somewhat Simple, aka Design, 504 Main, Chic on a Shoestring, The 36th Avenue, Beyond the Picket Fence, Southern Lovely, At the Picket Fence, Thrifty Decorating, Remodelaholic, Miss Mustard Seed

Adventures in Sewing a Zipperless Pillow

Like many women, I love me a beautiful throw pillow. Textiles are just so purty and pillows are one of the easiest ways to soften up a room. They’re also a great way to add personality to a basic couch or duvet. In the case of our house, they’re a way to dress up our hand-me-down couch.

Before I dive into this little pillow-making tutorial, first let me introduce you to my new(ish) friend, Suzy the sewing machine:

She’s a pre-WWII Singer Featherweight sewing machine. So she’s kind of a new-to-me situation. My grandma has a similar one that she and my mom have used to sew many beautiful things, including both of these lovely Halloween costumes:

That pumpkin isn't on my dress -- it was on the scanned picture. Side note: Don't ever dress your 5 year old up like a bride for Halloween. She will not know how to answer the question, "Where's your groom?" every time she rings a doorbell, and so she will get snotty. And if you are 5 and you're reading this, 1) how impressive and 2) definitely pick what you want to be for Halloween before your mom gets any ideas.

But I digress.

My mom always wanted my sister and I to have our own featherweights, and she saw this one at the shop where she took hers to get serviced. It was a very pleasant non-birthday, non-Christmas surprise. Suzy doesn’t have a lot of bells and whistles, so she’s very easy to use. I decided to break her out and make a pillow for my first project.

I bought this pink patterned fabric on fabric.com, but before you go chasing it down, you should know that I bought it over a year ago. That seems to be a theme this week.

I decided to do a zipperless pillow because, well, zippers intimidated me. My mom always made them sound hellish, but she was always sewing clothes costumes. I found out last month that when it comes to pillow sewing, zippers are pretty easy. But I consider this pillow more of a step one, so we’re starting here.

I picked up a 14” pillow on sale at Joann’s Fabrics. In hindsight, I wish I had splurged a little bit more because this pillow is very flat. Next time I will buy something a little more plush.

First, I measured and cut a piece of fabric about 16” square. That sounds like a lot, but, it’s better to cut too big than too small. And this was my first try, so I was leaving room for error. I cut the back pieces after looking at a flap-close pillow I had at home, and I determined that the overlap should be an inch or two. With about a ½” hem, that meant that I needed between two and three inches more than my initial 16” square, so I cut a piece of fabric to be 16” x 19”. Then I cut the 19” piece in half.  

Next came the sewing process. I needed to hem the overlap sides first so that it could be sewed into the square, so I folded one side of each of the smaller pieces over and sewed a hem. Once those two pieces were hemmed on the open side, I placed the 16” square face up, and placed the two back pieces face down so that all the sides lined up. Then I pinned around the sides, pointing the pins towards the center of the pillow.

 

Once all the pins were in, I was ready to start sewing. I started in one corner, reinforcing the initial stich by sewing forward, backward, and then forward again. After going around all four sides, I reinforced the last stitches and cut the thread. Then I picked another corner, reinforced the first stitch, and sewed around the square again.

After I finished sewing, I turned the pillow inside out so that it was, well, no longer inside out.  Then I placed my pillow form inside the pillowcase.

And that’s when I determined it looked really, really limp. No worries! I took the pillow form out and flipped the pillow cover inside out again. I did another two stiches about ½” inside the original stitches to shrink the size of the pillow. Then I tested the pillow again, and it looked much better. Once I determined that the pillow cover was the right size, I took it off the pillow, cut the edges to shrink the excess a bit, and cut the corners diagonally so that there wasn’t a bunch of extra fabric stuffed in the corner.

Now the pink pillow resides on our couch, but I’m thinking about snatching it for my bed soon. Of course, that will be after I sew some new ones for the couch. Oh, and don't be fooled into thinking that I still have my Christmas decorations up. This was just the best picture I have of our couch pillows right now. Which reveals that yes, I completed this project a little while ago. You caught me. 

Has anyone else taken up a new sewing project lately?