The dog and the chair

Light summer evenings mean later bedtimes for Zebra-girl and Dinosaur-boy...last night we could hear whispering and giggling from the bedrooms and frequent trips down to the recycling box. At 9.30pm they took their new dog, Harry, for a walk to meet us. He has a lovely red tongue that can be flipped up inside when he's not feeling particularly tongue-outy...it doubles as a lovely red nose. He can open his mouth to be fed...and in his stomach they have stored lots of food that they have made for him. He has bits of yarn stuck on for a tail. He can even hold a small ball on his tongue.

It's interesting how much more inventive they are when there are no grown-ups involved.

Now on to matters of upholstery...this is not my speciality...but I'm enthusiastic and your encouragement after my last post is making me seriously consider tackling this chair. But I need help if you have a minute to give it...do you have any pointers to good videos (one of you mentioned Texan women on YouTube...but they're elusive creatures and aren't popping up in my searches) or tips on how I should go about doing this? I've found a brilliant local supplier of everything I might need....but first I need to think about how I want to do it.

Should I remove the springs and go for webbing? I've taken another picture of the chair today. I have four very good springs on the back, but the springs on the base of the chair will need taking off completely as they're too old, as is the webbing that they are attached to. 

I want the back and seat cushion to be integral and fixed to the chair...is there a special way of building up the layers to form a nice domed seat and back pad...and what should the layers consist of?

About a year after I'd first rescued this chair from a skip and reupholstered it (very badly) myself, Mr Teacakes and I were walking along Upper Street in Islington and saw a chair identical to this one in the window of one of the boutiques. It was immaculately upholstered in deep purple velvet and had a price tag of nearly £1000 (this was over ten years ago, so I'm assuming the price would be even more inflated now). It was the same chair...but very much not the same chair. Knowing what it could look like, has always made me hanker after having another go at it and making it look a little more like the one in the shop window. Perhaps my 33-year-old self can do a better job of it than my 21-year-old self....

Re-upholstering this chair at the dawn of the Internet, my 21-year-old self searched for 'leather hides' and then didn't go online again for a couple of months as she was so shocked by the search results that the strange new 'information super highway' had returned (because people actually really called it that then). The chair ended up being covered in chenille instead...the leather route was just too trepidatious to explore further...provisions for it were obtained through the Yellow Pages. It's amazing how quickly things have changed in the last 12 years...and how much more blasé one has become at having ones sensibilities unexpectedly challenged.

Florence x

NB: Yes, of course I didn't get to the end of writing this post without revisiting that search term. Alas, there was nothing even remotely tawdry to be found. I think that very few small businesses had an online presence at that point and search engines weren't as sophisticated in understanding what it was you probably wanted...which meant that some very odd things were able to float to the surface.