arm chair

Recovering an Arm Chair

Woohoo!  Finally finished one of the projects on my  ”almost done” list! 

This is the arm chair I bought at the antique show a couple of weeks ago.  It was in good shape, but it needed a paint redo to freshen it up and it definitely new fabric.   

Chair before

New fabric

It took me five fabric stores before I found the perfect fabric.  It’s hard to shop for something you can only see in your head!  ha!

Cream chalk paint

I bought a quart of Annie Sloan chalk paint.  I have been hearing and reading about it a lot lately.  It’s suppose to cover furniture without prep work.  That’s all I needed to hear!   

Distressed paint

After two coats of paint (and it dries really fast!)  I sanded the edges a bit for a distressed finish.  I’m a novice at this, so I’m just winging it here.  The paint calls for a wax finish.  I wanted to buy clear wax but after searching the world over (a little exaggeration), I settled for a light “natural” wax.  It worked, but I would have preferred clear.  I looked up instructions for using Annie Sloan chalk paint and chuckled at the very easy and straight to the point directions…

The steps in brief
“Paint, paint, wax, wipe. Sand then wax then wipe (dark wax at this point with the clear wax).  Finally polish the piece the next day for a mellow sheen.”  How’s that for simple???  Ha!

covering old fabrics

Before I started recovering the chair, I had to take off the double weld trim.  (Not shown, it’s in the garbage.)  It was done in the same material as the rest of the chair.  I didn’t take the original fabric off the chair before recovering because it’s attached with a million staples.  After pulling off the trim, I had enough of pliers!  I used the original fabric as a guide for doing the corners and rounded edges. 

Getting there!

I used a staple gun to attach the fabric to the chair.  Some places I used a little hot glue when I ran out of hands to hold everything.

Double cording

Here is how the double weld cording looks on the chair.  I looked at quite a few fabric stores for ready-made trim to use around the edges.  It never occurred to me to put double weld cording back on the chair.  I didn’t know how and it looked complicated.  NOT SO!  Oh my gosh!  It was so easy and soooo cheap to do.  I had left over fabric and spend $10.00 on the cord.  Ready made trim would have cost me around $30.00.  I went to google for directions and this is the blog I used for directions… Centsational Girl.

Gluing trim

Spatula

The back of the chair just had fabric on it.  It was pushed up into the frame of the chair.  I folded over the edge of the fabric and glued it on.  I used  a spatula to stuff it in the frame.  Spatulas aren’t just for cooking, ya know!

Done

Ta Da!  It’s finished.  Not too bad for a fly by the seat of your pants kind of girl!