How I Got My New Job

As I've mentioned a few times in the past few months, I've been laid off work since October, but all that changed just last week! It's been a bit hectic since everything happened really fast.

I went out on Tuesday (June 4th) to see if Fabricville had any supplies that I could use for my chair project. They had lots of decent upholstery fabrics, and gimp (the fancy edging), but no burlap, and no webbing. I knew about an upholsterer that was just a few blocks away, so I walked down there.

I knew about this upholsterer because this was the guy we had used when we did the Pizza Hut job. We built all the seats, but we subcontracted the upholstery portion to this guy, and he had done a really nice job.





So I went there and asked the owner if I could buy some supplies (mainly just the webbing), and he measured-out about 4 or 5 yards of it for me, and charged me 5$. We chit-chatted a bit and I told him I remembered him from the Pizza Hut job, and that I was a cabinetmaker, etc, and he offered me a job. I said yes!

It's not exactly in my field, but upholstery still has a woodworking aspect to it, and I'm sure it's a job that I'm really going to enjoy.

Not only that, it's actually paying better than my woodworking job. I was quite excited to start. I left him my name and phone number, and he called back on Wednesday, letting me know that I could start on Thursday at 8am.

Currently I'm not working on anything too exciting, but I'm really looking forward to working on some rather complicated pieces. Right now I'm stripping old vinyl covers off some seats and backs from a clinic. There are a LOT of pieces, and I've been stripping them off for the past 3 days (with about another day left).

These are the ones I've done so far...



One of the old vinyl covers:


So here's the chair so far. I completely reglued the frame and glue blocks with hide glue, attached the webbing, and sewed the springs.





To stretch the webbing tightly, I made myself a home-made webbing stretcher out of some scrap plywood.



This is how you would use it. The webbing to the upper left would be tacked at one end of the chair, and the other end would be tensioned by leveraging the handle downwards. The extra webbing looped over the front of the "paddle" would protect the edge of the chair. It actually worked really well.



While I did the hide-glue repairs to the chair, I also repaired this clock. All of the top pieces are new replacement pieces (all the originals had been broken off and lost decades ago), and I had originally glued them down with hide glue, but they had snapped off during the move back in 2010. Now it's all nice and secure again. This is a wooden-works clock (all the gears and plates are wood), with a hand painted wood dial, and it's from around 1830-1835. I also started to paint the tablet in the bottom (which was also missing), but it's not finished. Currently it only has the border done in gold and silver bronzing powders, but it will also have a painted scene with trees in the centre.



More soon!