Set of 4 dining room chairs. I was *SURE* I had a set of before photos of these chairs, and apparently it slipped my mind. They were dark grey with silver tacks (see earlier photo of finished green Victorian Chair in the lower left corner).

During:
All the tacks on the back portion are all done individually by hand. The 4 chairs took up around 1200 tacks. It seems tedious, but it went fairly quickly and easily.

After:
The fabric on these was quite fun and cheerful. The interior is a geometric pattern with greens and blues, while the back is a chenille type solid cream fabric with antique gold tacks.

New Photos:

Pair of Victorian reproduction chairs (and a set of 6 drop-in dining room chair seats (same fabric): not shown).

Before:

In typical fashion, a previous upholsterer covered over the old cover rather than remove it (as we always do). You can also see that the seat is very bumpy/lumpy.

The reason that the seat was so lumpy was because the foam had torn through the springs. There is usually a burlap or other covering/barrier over the springs to prevent this from happening. The chairs were taken down to the bare frames, and new foam, cotton/padding was installed along with the new top fabric.

During:

After:

Here’s a wing chair Pierre recovered in a Dark Green and diamond pattern fabric. Sorry for the blurry photos, we didn’t really take the time to properly photograph this one. It’s a beautifully made old frame, and this one had a down-filled cushion.

These two wing chairs were actually done by Pierre about 5 years ago for this client, and she decided to change them again to something different. Hooray for repeat business! Here is the before (which I actually quite liked):

During:

On these, I was the one who did all of the coverings for the two chair frames (Pierre did the cushions/sewing, etc).

After:

Today’s project was a wing chair (or wing-back chair). It had been sitting in the shop for a few weeks, partially disassembled (stripped and ready to work on), and we finished it today. My Pierre had stripped and refinished the legs on the chair just yesterday (they were scratched-up pretty badly).

This morning, the first piece to be installed was the deck (the part under the seat cushion), and the front roll. Pierre had to leave, so I was put on another job, and we continued after he got back (which is when I got this “during” photo).

We added a new layer of thin padding over the wings, but the rest of the chair (foam/stuffing) was in pretty good shape. Note that in the photo above, the large section of padding for the backrest is not reattached to the chair yet.

One thing to note is that a lot of these chairs usually have the backs done differently. On this one originally (and on several others) upholsterers will just stretch over some additional fabric around the wings, and then just do a plain rectangular panel over the back. That doesn’t look as nice when the back is shaped, so Pierre prefers to install the back following the contours of the chair instead (which takes a bit more time, but looks a lot nicer).

These were a bit tricky because of the shape of the chair. Part of it also had to be reglued/fixed before we upholstered it.

A beautiful early Victorian chair with turned legs, redone in a blue cotton stripe. The frame on this chair needed a lot of attention, and a few repairs.