Transcripts
1. Intro: Welcome to What She Making
Simple Upholstery course. I am Shira. I'm a creative soul, a maker, a mama, a craft czar. I've done many Crafts shows and projects from
lipstick to baking. I've done it all in this class. You will learn the following. Where to find the
appropriate fabric. The necessary tools you need for a simple Upholstery project. The types of chairs
that are appropriate, as well as my step-by-step
Upholstery techniques. So for your class project, you will re-upholster a chair and share your before
and after photos. So let's get started.
2. Fabric and Tools: Hello again and welcome to What She Making Simple
Upholstery course. I am so glad that you are here taking this
course with me. I hope that you get so
much out of it and I can't wait to just
jump right in. So first, let's talk about this simple Upholstery
step-by-step. So we're considering
here fabric, the shape of the chair, and the tools that
you're going to need. So step-by-step, this is
what we're talking about. What type of fabric, what type of Chair
and what tools are required for fabric? I know the most obvious choice
would be to go on down to your local Joanne's or Walmart and get some
Upholstery fabric. But I just want to
let you know that dish towels, shower
curtains, bedding, all sorts of things are just
as appropriate to explore for fabric choices
and might even be a little bit cheaper
than the traditional route. You can go the
traditional route. There's no problem with that, but I want to let you know that you can consider some
other things as well. And as far as the chair shape, this is not the time
for you to jump in how to do a
wing back chair or a sofa or a Chair and-a-half
were strictly talking like a dining room chair
or even a chair with a simple Back along with a seat. Something where we
can unscrew the seats and take that fabric off
and put another fabric arm. That's what we're
walking through today. Just very, very
simple instructions. The easiest version
of Upholstery. Here are the tools that I use. I have a flat head
screwdriver as well as a prying tool that I got
from an Upholstery shop. It has that special V-shape in order to get the staples off. Speaking of staples, I have used all of these things
are regular stapler, a manual stapler, as well as
a power of electric stapler, and a glue gun. You don't always
need a glue gun, but a glue gun does
come in handy. So that's less than one
3. Covering a Chair Back: Welcome to lesson two. In this lesson, I'm just
going to walk you through how I did a chair
that has a Back. So here I've already
remove the seeds. And what you want to look for is how to get the Seat
from the chair. So you want to be able to
take it completely off. Most chairs will
have some kind of screws to attach to
Seat to the chair. But once you find that, grab your screwdriver
and undo it all. Now, I go through
this process fairly quickly in a couple of screens, but I wanted to show
you exactly what I was doing with the
Back of the chair. So my chair is oval
and I have it stacked up with a oval fabric. So that's the rear fabric. I haven't cut in the
shape of an oval. The stuffing I tried to form in that shape and the front
fabric is of course, cut in the shape of
an oval as well. The rear fabric and the front fabric don't
necessarily have to be the same. But in my case, they are. This is the order in which
I would staple them. I would staple the top of the fabric directly
to the frame, the wood frame of the chair. I'd pull it taut and I
would staple the bottom. Then I would staple either
side and then pull it again and staple the other
side and then go all around. Just try to make sure
that my staples are even. Now for the stuffing, makes sure it's encased in. That's just my way of saying this is not
necessarily a time to have your loose polyphyletic out and trying
to piece it together. Know you want to have the
shape of your the shape of your pillow or encasement to match the shape of
the back of the chair. So in the video you will see that mine is kinda
close to the shape. I kinda make it work. But the important part
is that it's encased. Then your front
fabric gets stapled. And I tried to make sure that I staple in the same way with top, then pulled and bottom, then side and pulled
into other side. This is for this good work for a rectangular shape
chair at the top, as well as a square shape, just any shape chair
that you have, you can follow the
same instructions. And once you've done that, don't forget the trims. You have all of those
exposed staples around the edges of your fabric. You cut around it as you're
going to see that I do. And then hot glue your
trim to finish it. Now I'm going to show
you how I did this Seat, which by the way is a
shower curtain fabric that I got from Target. But right now I want to concentrate on the
back of the chair. So I cut out a dish towel, believe it or not,
I bought to dish towels and a shower
curtain from Target, cut out the back of the one of the dish towels and stapled
it forms the chair, then stapled a pillow
down all around it. That is the dish towel
that I purchased. I put another dish towel on top and staple that
all the way around. And I'd cut the trim off of the bottom of this dish towel. You see I have the
tag on there to show you it's from that
Open House line. So this is how it looks after the front and the back have been stapled directly to the wood. I just use my manual stapler to staple it directly
to the wood. Then I laid it down
and just trimmed it very closely to the staples. And once I had that trimmed, I went ahead and hot glued that trim that came from
the same dish towel. I hot glues that all the
way around the edges. So this is just a quick tutorial on how to do the
back of a chair. Because if it's open back or if you have to
take the pieces off. You just want to staple
around the shape, put the filling back in. I added feeling in this case. Then staple the
front all the way around and then put a
trim on with hot glue. So I did to chairs like this. And in a later lesson, I'm going to show you how to pull and staple when you're
doing Upholstery like this because it's the
same whether you're doing the back of the chair
or the Seat of the Chair, the technique is the same, so I'm gonna show you
that in a later video. But this is definitely how you want to get
your chairs looking. Again, a shower curtain
for the Seat guys, and dish towels for the Back
4. Re-upholstering a Chair Seat: So welcome to lesson three. We are going to get into my
Simple Upholstery technique. I have to Seat
covers are two Seat to chairs that I've already
unscrewed from the bottom. And I used my prying tool. You can see on the side there, I use my prying tool
in order to go around and pick the staples off and
take the old fabric off. These are some chairs
that had been sitting outside at my in-laws and had a little bit
of damage on them, a little water damage. So that's why we're
recovering them. Here. I did get some
just cotton fabric from a local fabric store. And in order to figure
out how much I need, I just simply lay it
on top of the Seat. I make sure that it's doubled and I get a rough measurement. Guys, this doesn't have to be super-complicated
or anything. I just get a rough
measurement of how much I'm going to need and
I cut it accordingly. You can see it doesn't
even have to be that neat. But basically, you just want
to have about three or 4 " around because around the seats or even the back of the chair. If you notice in
the last lesson, the back of the
chair had a lot of excess fabric around it. Because what you want
to be able to do is have enough fabric that you can pull from
the center to make sure, From centers pool from
the edges to make sure that the fabric is tall. That is the number one
key to Upholstery. You want very hot fabric. As you see all the holes from where I pulled out the staples, I'm basically going to
go back to that area. And this is what I like to do. I do the corners first
because I find that for a square or rectangular or
anything with an angle on it, It's easier for me to
get sharp corners. If I take one corner, make sure that's secure
that with a staple, I have my electric stapler out, then I take the opposite
corner, pull it. And while it is pulled, I staple that down. And then I do the same thing
with the other two corners. Because you just
see, you see how its height I'm pulling
and then stapling. All of those corners are pulled very tightly and
then stapled down. Then I want to go
to the center of each side and do the same
thing, pull and Staple. So I'm just working my way
around this seat cushion. I'm checking to make sure
there are no wrinkles. Everything gets nice and
smooth and I am pulling it, stapling it down. I do like to stop and
periodically check to make sure that I don't have any
wrinkles, any bubbles, anything that's going
to make it less than smooth as I worked my
way around the sides. I just wanted to show you guys this issue that I was
running into because of the age of these
seats and you might be flipping something
that you found on the curb or that you own a long time or even that you've picked up at
the flea market. Sometimes you will run into spots in the woods that are
too soft to staple into. I just want to let you know
you can still work it. You just have to find a
way to work around it. Sometimes you have to
staple a little lower, sometimes a little higher. But the point is keep
trying different locations. Like I said, these particular
seats had a bit of water damage and yes, you can always replace the wood. That's not my forte,
to be honest. But I found a way
to still be able to use these seats with the word because there's a
lot of it That's still good. It wasn't like completely
fallen apart and crumbling. So I went ahead and
used what was here. And you're gonna see
in a later picture you got a little
bit of a glimpse of the seat covers that I had
done in a different fabric, which is also a choice. I did alternating so too were in a light blue fabric and to Seat covers were in this
darker blue floral. And I'm just going to speed
things up a little bit. So you can see me working
all the way around the Seat. So I wanted to show you this
just in case you don't have a square or rectangular shape Chair Seat that you're
trying to cover. This is to order
in which I would staple for these
other two shapes. So if I had a circle, I would staple still
the top first, then pull staple the bottom, then staple the side, pool stapled other side, and then go in between each of those locations and try
to get my staples nice. And even with a
circle, especially, I just check a whole lot more to see to make sure
there are no wrinkles, no particles in the fabric
as I pull and staple. And so for this
other chair shape that I have in the
previous lesson, this is how I stapled it. I started at the curve
in of the chair staple that pulled it's hot stapled
to bottom then the sides. And since they were corners
on the front of this Chair, I staple each corner next
by pulling it taut and then stapling them with these other
chair shapes like again, just making sure that your staples or even
that you're pulling the fabric taut and that you are checking for particles
on the other side as you go, you're sure to get it right. It's not that hard.
You can totally do it. So now that the Seat
is fully covered, I'm going to take
my scissors and go all the way around and try to get pretty close to the staples. I want to get really, really close and just trim all
of that excess fabric off. Now of course, you
can leave this. It is not a requirement
to trim the fabric. However, you don't want that hanging from
underneath the seat. If it's somewhere that
can be seen and it might interfere with screwing the
Seat back to its frame, it's chair frame,
but if you can get it back on the Seat with excess
fabric, it's your choice. You don't have to trim it. I just prefer to trim
it as close as I can to the staples. And this is a little
extra step that I do. Once I have it
trimmed pretty close, I like to go back in and
reinforce the corners and some of the
sides just to make sure everything is
going to be nice, insecure when I'm ready to put that down Back to the frame. And this it will this
is how it will look on the underside of your seat once you've stapled
everything down, trimmed it out, reinforced it. This is how it will look. And then on the front, nice and smooth, ready to be
reattached to your chair?
5. Thank you: So, thank you so much for
taking this course with me. I hope that you learned
a lot and I can't wait to see your pictures
in the project gallery.
6. Outro: Creativity Journal: I just want to thank you for taking this course
with me and Simple Upholstery and let
you know about my Creativity Journal called unleashing creativity,
the inspiration Journal. It's really just a journey through different
sort of prompts and ideas in order to get your creativity
flowing, get you unstuck. This is the exact method that I use when I'm kinda
filling in a Creativity read or need to try to get
more ideas for our project. So I hope that you
check this out. It's available on
Amazon for 14, 99. It is a great tool to have
an I hope you enjoy it
Shera Morris, Crafter and Curator of Creative Living
