If you’ve been following along the past few weeks, you know I’ve been doing a lot of upholstery.  Upholstering is a skill I learned out of necessity.  I had a slate blue & mauve overstuffed freebie chair that wasn’t working with the fabrics I wanted to use, so I sort of reupholstered it.  I was too afraid to really pull the chair apart, so I did a totally made-up half-slipcover-half-upholstery sort of thing.  “Slipholstery”, if you will.  It was a bit of a mess, but I was so proud of that chair.  It gave me the courage to purchase other chairs that needed to be reupholstered.

I started working on more yard sale finds and I learned on each one along the way.  I’m still learning.  I still have a lot of limitations when it comes to upholstery and I still make some things up as I go along, but my pieces usually turn out pretty well!

So, I thought I would share some more of how I do things.  It may not always be 100% the way a professional upholsterer would do it, but it works for me.

When I took this chair apart, it just had fabric and foam on the back.  That’s adequate, but I wanted to reinforce it with some webbing.  It just makes the chair back feel a bit more secure when you’re leaning on it and it protects the fabric from being pushed through while moving it or if it gets in the way of kids rough-housing.

In this video tutorial, I show how I reinforced the back and put everything back together again…