Finished Antique Chair

The chair has been finished since Monday, but I wasn't able to properly photograph it until this afternoon.

There have been several past posts about the chair, and its progress, which I'll list below in order.

Monday, June 03, 2013 - Random Side Projects
Monday, June 03, 2013 - Tearing Off
Monday, June 10, 2013 - How I Got My New Job
Sunday, June 16, 2013 - A Few Random things
Saturday, July 13, 2013 - House/Project Updates
Wednesday, September 11, 2013 - Antique Chair Update
Thursday, September 12, 2013 - Antique Chair Update (Part 2)
Saturday, September 14, 2013 - Antique Chair Update (Part 3)
Saturday, September 21, 2013 - Random Update

If you're not planning to browse through the old posts showing the progress, I'm only going to include one "before" photo (again) here.

As a quick recap, the chair was a roadside trash find from 2 blocks away. I stripped it down, took the frame apart, reglued it with period correct hide glue, repaired the original shellac finish (to blend together the crackle), polished/buffed with dark wax, and finally I redid all the upholstery, which included:

- Install new webbing
- Attach springs
- 8-way hand tie the springs
- New burlap cover
- Black fabric "straw cover" (to help keep the straw dust contained in the chair seat)
- Re-fluff and pad down the original straw
- Re-install the original "felt padding", which we discovered is actually Kapok*
- New layer of soft cotton padding
- Layer of thin muslin fabric
- Top fabric
- Hot-glued decorative gimp cording
- hand tacked black bottom fabric

* Kapok is a fluffy seed-pod fiber from the kapok tree, which is a gigantic tropical tree. It is silky, cottony, and reminiscent of the fluff commonly found in milkweed pods. This was a common upholstery stuffing material for decades, but isn't used often today.

BEFORE!



AFTER!







As you can see, even though the popular vote was for the pink or dark raspberry gimp, I ended up choosing a very dark green (which wasn't shown). I'm very pleased with the finished chair.