Have a Seat....

Well, before school was out last year, a fellow teacher asked me if I would recover some dining room chairs for her. Knowing that chairs are very simple, I said yes. Well I was in for a surprise. I'd never seen dining room chairs put together like this. My teacher friend told me that they were hand made and had been in her family for years.

Notice that instead of just having a padded board for the bottom these have frames and springs. They were really worn and somebody had stuffed some plastic bags under the springs just to keep the springs from popping through.

Have any of you ever seen chairs assembled like this?

So anyway, to make this work I had to take this apart, there were too many springs that were broken. Then I used webbing on the bottom of each chair. Then a layer of muslin, then foam, then more muslin, then batting, finally the decorative fabric that the customer had selected.

I'm pleased with the way the chairs turned out, and I hope my customer is too. Oh, I normally don't do custom work, I usually just do the work that pleases me and put it in my booth hoping that a customer will like it and take it home. But, being a teacher, and I had this summer pretty free, I decided to take a few custom jobs. I'm finishing up the last one now. Yes, there is one more after these chairs.

Here's the before.

Here's the after; a total of 4 chairs.