Recovering Our Dining Chairs

I must be a glutton for punishment as no sooner had I finished doing our sofa than I decided to have a go at doing the dining chairs.  I had quite a bit of the plain black fabric left over so I didn't have to buy any fabric.  Our chairs have fabric set in the backs as well as the seats so it wasn't going to be an easy job.  As before, I searched Youtube and found a good video showing very similar chairs to ours and how the woman had stripped and covered them.

Our chairs were a pale pink velvet and they had studs around the outside.  Some of the studs were missing and the pink had got really dirty what with kids dropping food and the dog rubbing up against them.  Here are some photos of them before I started stripping them.

I decided I wasn't going to put the buttons through the backs either which would save a lot of work.

The stripping was a mini nightmare, there were so many staples, the studs were strips of pretend studs and they were fixed on with tiny staples plus then the fabric was stapled on with hardly any gaps.  I didn't have a proper staple removing tool so I had to use a bradawl to lift one side up and then a pair of pliers to pull them out.  This next photo shows one of the chairs with the top fabric stripped off and the one after shows another chair with the whole back taken out ready for rubbing down and varnishing.

The stain and varnish needed to dry off over night so I was doing either one or two at a time so that I could leave them up on the table to dry so the dog didn't brush past them and cover them with his hairs.

Once they were dry it was a case of stapling on the new fabric to the bottoms.  The backs were a bit harder as the foam that was in the backs had holes in where the buttons had gone through so I had to stuff some stuffing into the holes and then cover the whole piece with a bit of wadding which I glued over the foam.  This made the back nice and smooth when I covered it.  I had to staple the back piece on first then place the foam on top and then staple the front piece over it all.  It was quite a job as I had to make sure there were plenty of staples in it everywhere to make sure the fabric didn't pull out as soon as we sat on them.

The final bit to do was to cover the rows of staples with some lovely braid we got from Dunelm Mill using my new glue gun.  I found it easy to do although I did end up with a couple of burnt fingers.  Here is a photo of one of the finished chairs.

And here is a photo of them around our table with the Christmas table cloth on.