DIY Upholstery

So, lemme treat you to a before and after story.

This chair was given to me 20 years ago.  By a friend who knew I would enjoy 'doing it up'.  And for 20 years, we've used it as a spare chair, exactly as you see it here.  Grim, huh.  Every time - every time - we've been anywhere that involved fabric and  furniture, I've looked for something that would 'do' for the chair.  You need to understand that it hasn't exactly been very often.  In the last couple of years, I've had a realisation about my marriage, and that is basically that unless he HATES it, Mr Dunnit is mostly ambivalent about furniture, furnishings and house stuff.  He seems happy if I'm happy. I know this is rather lovely actually, but it also frustrates me when I want more than a 'yeah, s'nice' and a shrugged shoulders type of opinion.  Ah well, can't have it all.  And frankly, if he had a strong opinion that was contrary to mine, we'd only argue.  And there would be an impasse, like the time we couldn't agree on tiles for the new bathroom.....oh I digress. So, LLJan posts a picture of one of her craft sale cushion makes and the fabric makes me realise  - that's what I've been waiting for to do the chair!  Cool.  Cue a quick trip to Marlborough and as usual with LLJ, some laughter.  So, then there's the colour of the chair to consider.  I decide to try to match the brown in the pattern, as the chair 'lives' next to a piece of oak furniture against a creamy coloured wall.  (Am I making it sound posh? I hope so!).  I took the fabric to the paint matching people that we use in the business side of our lives and they made up a colour.  Mr Dunnit took the chair to the workshop and sprayed it.  And brought it home.  It looked very thoroughly as if I'd chosen the colour of Poo.  I wasn't distraught so much as put out...after all, a litre of bespoke paint colour isn't quite like the off the shelf can for price....argh.  So I buckled and let him spray the topcoat. And decided it was two things - 
1.the perfect colour match, how clever of the paint people, and
2. going to have to do.  

So then, in my extremely amateur and unprofessional way, I added a new foam seat pad and tacked in 100 upholstery nails....also spray painted the colour of erm, Poo. And the result, as you see here, is  not showing a lot of the brown to which it was all matched.  Shucks. See, told you it was an amateur job.  And those tacks were so much harder to do than I thought!  Now, I know it's an 'on trend' fabric, and you might think I'll tire of it quickly.  But I won't.  I love it. So does Mr Dunnit. I think.  And hey, it took me 20 years to get around to changing the last fabric, and I hated that!