Reupholstering: Putting it back together

Before I begin this post I want to share some exciting news. I just did some work on our car by myself. Sure, it was just changing a headlight, and my husband had to walk me through detailed steps before he ran to class, but when it all comes down to it... I did it by myself. And I feel cool about that. Nothin' like popping the ol' hood and getting some grease on your hands - am I right?

Back to the real reason of this post. Remember that ghastly chair we took apart in this post? This is part 2 of how to take an ugly wingback like that to a gorgeous new piece of furniture! I'll rewind a bit to remind you where we left off: we had all of the fabric, staples and padding off of the chair and it looked pretty bare. The next step was probably my favorite. Shopping for new fabric!

We went to a Home Fabric store after running, screaming, out of Joann's fabric due to their extravagant prices. I mean, $30/yard? I don't think so... on our first try.
We narrowed our choices down to four and decided to go with the most complex pattern. It was a beautiful burlap foundation with velvet design on top. We brought our pieces from the original chair to lay out on the store floor and make sure we had enough.

 For this little chair it probably took about 4 yards. We got extra just in case, but we had alot left over. (Maybe a footstool tutorial is in our future.) We found that the best way to measure each piece was to lay the old scraps ontop of the parts of the design that we wanted and cut around them.
Going little by little we cut, stretched over the frame and stapled in place. It is very important to pull each piece tight or else you will have to go back and redo parts because they will get wrinkly! Here are the steps we took: inside arms, seat, bottom rim, wings, outside arms, back, bottom.

 There were two spots that I had to pull out my handy sewing machine and stitch the ribbing along the bottom rim and the edges of the wings. I used our old scraps as a reference to know where the pieces met.
Our original little chair had buttons on the seat and the back, but we decided to forego this step because our chosen pattern was complex and beautiful on its own. We simply stuffed the button holes with extra padding and added another thin sheet on top.
In a few days I'll post the last two steps and finished results!!