A tale of two chairs

A few years ago I picked up a set of replica Le Corbusier chairs that my sister saw on Gumtree for $120. There was a three seater, a two seater and three armchairs. There were also three Barcelona footstools, which I onsold for $40 each, basically making these chairs free (apart from the several trips across the city with sofas strapped to the roof etc). Such a bargain!

The sofas and one armchair were upholstered in black leather, while the other two armchairs were covered in black vinyl. The vinyl had seen better days and I hatched a plan to recover them in a patchwork of fabrics, an idea I had seen somewhere and liked.

Here they are in their original state with a painting of Perth by my Mum on the wall above!

As armchair upholstery goes, it doesn't get much easier than these. They consist of four blocks, held in a frame by a few screws. Once they are apart, it is easy to make a cover for each block and staple it on at the base. It was also a good opportunity to give them a good clean and retrieve forgotten items such as assorted pens, a spoon and a long-lost front door key. 

For the covering, I collected old sample books of expensive upholstery fabrics from Remida, the local recycling centre. I cut out the fabrics with a blue theme and added in the odd bit of pink and purple. 

Then it was time to get patching! This was time-consuming, but quite enjoyable playing with these lovely coloured and textured fabrics. I joined pieces together in a design that I liked and that was just larger than the panel size I needed. I trimmed the panels to size with a rotary cutter and then joined them together to cover the chair blocks. I didn't worry about seam matching in the patchwork as I wanted a more random, rustic look.

Here is a chair in progress. It's very exciting to put it together and see the effect.

Truffle helped where he could.

Finally it was time to put the screws back in and admire the finished product.

Each chair probably took about 8 hours total work. I did the first one about three years ago and it has taken Perth going into a five day lockdown last week for me to get around to doing the second one! I have to say that I am ridiculously happy with these and very proud of my 'statement chairs'. I keep going over to admire them.