Edith gets a makeover

Back in 2014 I reupholstered and gave second life to a “Gossip chair” that I found on the side of the road. I named her Edith and she became a much loved piece of furniture in our house. Time and use took its toll on the green and yellow vintage silk and it was time for a makeover.

I was using Edith as my work-from-home desk chair and, together with kitty claws, she was really looking quite sad. The first step in the makeover was to carefully remove upholstery tacks and hundreds of staples so that I could use the fabric pieces as templates and leave the wooden frame (mostly) free of sharp metal pieces. My 5 year old was a very diligent helper pulling out many a staple with his trusty pliers.

The structure of the chair is still strong and I did my best to keep the underlying layers intact. We did have a minor issue of breaking the wooden dowel holding the armrest in place. Thankfully my handy hubby helped fix that at the end of reconstruction.

After removing all the fabric pieces, I laid them out on my new fabric to choose the correct patterns and carefully cut the shapes out. I use the term ‘carefully’ somewhat loosely because, unlike sewing projects, there is quite a lot of tweaking that happens during the construction as you pull and secure the fabric in place. The new fabric is a beautiful piece of Lula Fabric’s Suzani in Red which I have had in my stash for years just waiting for the right project. I love this fabric. It is 100% cotton in rich colours and all locally designed and printed. I do worry that it might fade or look worn quite quickly but I think it’s worth the risk.

Finally with all the deconstruction and planning done, we could start with the piece by piece installation. Again my 5 year old was very keen to help with the staple gunning! I put it together slowly: setting, pulling, stapling, trimming, folding and tweaking and stapling some more. I couldn’t find new upholstery tacks so had to reuse some that weren’t destroyed in the deconstruction. I would prefer more down the back of the chair but for now it does the job. One particularly South African challenge was that I needed to plan my work around loadshedding (planned power cuts) so that I could have the light I needed or take advantage of manual work (pulling out staples) when I couldn’t do computer (real) work!

This project has been a long time in the making and I’m so excited with the output! Edith is once again smiling and so am I. Now I just have to keep dirty kids and scratchy cats off the masterpiece!