Introduction to Upholstery: Recovering a Basic Chair Seat with Catherine

Upholstery is the craft of covering wooden structures to create comfortable, beautiful seats, poufs, sofas, headboards, and other furniture. Often, upholstery consists of deconstructing an old, worn piece of furniture, renewing the underlying materials and recovering with a new exterior fabric and decorative elements.

In this class, you will deconstruct, renew and recover a basic chair with an upholstered seat. This can be a dining room chair, desk chair, rocker, decorative chair, or any other kind of straight chair with a plain back, with or without wooden arms. Through these three steps you will learn to:

• Decipher the history of the piece of furniture as you uncover the base layer by layer;
• Identify and fix any problems with the wooden structure;
• Choose the degree of padding for the renewed seat;
• Rebuilding the padded seat base;
• Select and cut a suitable exterior fabric;
• Attach and trim the exterior fabric;
• Reattach the updated seat to the wooden structure.

Through this process, you will learn to use basic upholstery tools and upholstery vocabulary.

Catherine Severo, the class leader, is an upholsterer trained in France.

Please wear closed shoes so that you do not step on any nails or staples!

If you have your own straight chair that you would like to recover or a piece of fabric you would like to use, please bring it. Otherwise, we will have suitable chairs (from thrift stores) to work on (you will reimburse the price we paid the thrift store, from $5 to $18). We will also provide tools, seating materials, and a selection of fabrics to use.

At the end of the session, you will go home with your updated chair!

Also check out other Workshops in Norfolk.