How to upholster the back of a chair.

Firslty what do you take on holidays?  I drove, so of course that means you can fill the car up just a little bit more.  Let me start off with the things I forgot.  I forgot my phone charger, socks and hairbrush.  But at least I remembered the important stuff, my drill, staple gun, and hot glue gun.  Due to my little stint in hospital I didn't get an opportunity to pull out the drill and hot glue gun, but they got to come on holidays anyway.  My staple gun worked harder than ever.

 So here is the before picture

There are four chairs.  All of them had arms to the side, but some were very damaged so we ended up removing two sets.

The seat base was easily covered and I haven't done a tutorial on how to do this, as there is lots of tutorials on the web (remember google is my friend).  The front of the back of the chair is covered in the same way as the base, however that leaves the back of the chair exposed.

Excuse the blurry picture, but you get the idea.

So now I will beging my tutorial on how to upholster the back of a chair.  Two things to remember, I staple from the middle to the outsides, as you can make adjusments at the corners if needed, and trim most of you excess material as this leaves a less bulky look.

Lets get started in three easy peasy steps.

Step 1. Attach the material to the top of the chair (wrong side out) so that you flip the material over the staples and they will be hidden.



Top row of staples hold the fabric in place.



When fabric is flipped over staples are hidden and leaves a neat edge.

Its important to keep all lines lined up, and the row of staples neat.  I try to staple as close to the top of the chair as possible, this give me the line of the chair back to follow. And remember keep flipping the material back and forth to make sure it is looking straight, its easy to remove a wayward staple at this stage (which I did about 3029 times).

Step 2 The sides
Continue stapling unitl you get need the end and turn the edge under and staple in place.

Looks like this with material flipped over.

 I then tend put one staple in the material at the base of the back.  This just keeps the material in place, and nice and straight while I work on the sides.

Then using a strip of fake nails I attach the sides with tacks

Thats my strip of fake nails, you can see the holes every fifth tack along to tack in the real tacks (is that too many tacks in one sentance??)

Remember to keep the material straight and tight.

Step 3 The base

Staple in place from the middle out, keeping the material tight, then cut to fit around the legs

Trim off excess material.  Turn chair upright and try to get your daughter off it for a photo.

The Before

The After

Better than a suntan??

I'm linking this here