Fabric for the Ugly Chair

Now that the chair is stripped of its upholstery and painted its time to think about fabric.  I looked around at my local fabric stores and found these two beauties -  you can't see from the swatch but the beige fabric actually has birds on it!  With a name like Wren you know I'm lovin' me some birds!

Being my first upholstery project I was nervous about purchasing the fabric.  I was also afraid of working with a pattern my first time out especially since I picked the hardest chair ever as my first project!  So after doing a little reading on Miss Mustard Seed's blog here I decided to use a painters canvas drop cloth for my fabric.  It's inexpensive and you get a lot of fabric!  Depending on the chair,  one drop cloth could be all you need.  I picked one up while I was buying the paint at Home Depot.  Miss Mustard Seed makes the most beautiful slip covers from drop clothes and has reupholstered some chairs using old feed sacks!  LOVE that look.  I didn't have any feed sacks laying around though so I started preparing my drop cloth.  I put my washing machine on the soak cycle,  soaked the drop cloth in bleach for a good long time (a couple hours) and then washed it again using lots of fabric softener to get rid of some of the stiffness.  It worked like a charm! I love the texture and color of the fabric!

I decided, after draping the fabric over the chair and trying to get an idea of how it's going to look, that it needed a little something.  I had seen this little lovely on the Pottery Barn website here and knew a monogram would be perfect for my chair.

I contacted a friend of mine who has a monogram machine and she referred me to another friend whose machine was capable of larger monograms.  I picked out a font and marked where I wanted the monogram to go and now I'm waiting.  The monogram should be ready in a couple days.

Meanwhile I've been busy making the cording for the seat cushion. Let me just say that this has not been Easy Breezy!  The actual making of the cording was, but finding the proper foot for my sewing machine was not!  My local fabric store was clean out of zipper feet so after 3 visits on days they said "the truck is coming in"  I gave up and bought a cording foot.  The first one I bought was the wrong size for my machine, so I took it back and swapped it for one that did fit.  Once again I bought the wrong thing.  I think that cording foot was more for sewing on things like beads and trim, or to make tiny cording for baby clothes or something.  Instead of sewing right up against the cording it sewed right down the middle of it. Can you say frustrated!!??  I  had watched Miss Mustard Seed's tutorial on making cording and it looked so simple.  She used a zipper foot, so back to the store I went to take back the cording foot and to another store I learned about to get my zipper foot!  It was the weirdest looking thing I'd ever seen, but they promised me if it didn't fit my machine I could return it.  Well, lucky me, it worked wonderfully!  And here is my cording! 

I was so excited over the results I was squealing and clapping.  My 9 year old came running in to see what the excitement was all about.  Imagine the look on his face when he realized I was excited over cording!

I have hit a snag on the double welt cording that I need to cover the staples on the chair.  The upholstery shop in town has gone out of business.  I've done some looking online and I can buy a big reel of 250 yards, but I don't think I'll need quite that much.  I heard of another upholstery shop not far from here so I will call them tomorrow and see if they will sell me some.  Wish me luck!