Loving the Loveseat

My loveseat upholstery project is moving along. Thank you, Labor Day!

A few weeks ago the loveseat was stripped, springs were tied to a tight base and back of webbing, and I covered the whole shebang with burlap. I then took pause to debate fabric.

Thank you to all who offered input on fabric. I ended up choosing the dark horse, a zig-zag linen that I found on fabric.com for $7 per yard! The price was a big draw—the other fabrics I considered were $30-$40 per yard. I have always had a thing for zig-zags, ignited by an early love of Charlie Brown’s yellow tunic. My total fabric purchase was $41, including shipping, which was unbelievable. In my mind, this almost makes up for the $200 custom cushion.

In the past few weeks I embalmed the loveseat’s arms in cotton batting and tightly stapled a white cotton fabric over the whole situation. I cut a piece of foam to the camelback shape and stapled it to the seat back, then repeated the cotton/ fabric process.  The cotton pads the loveseat frame and the white fabric keeps the cotton contained, providing a clean tight surface for the final layer—the upholstery fabric.

Process shot. Right arm covered in cotton, foam on seat back. Note all of the paint tests on

our living room wall!

Cotton gets covered in fabric

After a day at the beach, I came home and covered the arms and seat back in the zigs. This involves

cutting the fabric in a few key spots, and stapling like a banshee.

Today I started stapling down the zig-zag faric on the arms and seat back. I am thrilled to say that the whole project is visually en fuego. Very graphic and fun, like my inspiration loveseat from Domino.

Loveseat in the "Domino Book of Decorating"

that inspired me.

Next weekend I am going to take the cushion to my upholstery teacher Gina’s studio in Alameda. She lets me use her professional-grade sewing machine to make cushion covers.  Summary: On the upholstery front we are cookin’ with grease.

Pale Moon is second from left. I don't know how great the color rendition is on your monitor, but mine sucks.

Pale Moon is brighter in real life.

Dean and I have decided to paint the living room in Benjamin Moore’s Pale Moon. It is a yellow that simply glows at night under our chandelier—in every way it reminds me of the elegant halo around the moon. In the natural morning light, however, Pale Moon is cheerful. Between this zig-zag sofa, our famous donut painting, and the yellow walls, we might not need to drink coffee in the morning—we can just walk into the living room for a jolt of energy. I am going to keep everything else in the room extremely neutral so it does not become a travelling circus for the eyes.

Mr. and Mrs. Chow have their first dance.

On another note, this weekend was a great poster child for a renovation/life balance. We were so happy to attend our dear friends’ Wilson and Erin’s wedding at the Golden Gate Club at the Presidio. Wilson and Erin are our true mutual friends—they introduced Dean and me two years ago! Congratulations to the Chows!

We also managed to go to Baker Beach to enjoy the gorgeous weather, paint up a storm, organize the storage room, got to yoga, and watch about 8 hours of college football (like I said, Wilson is in town). Hooray for three day weekends!

Dean is putting the finishing touches on our gorgeous new laundry room. He will write about that soon.  

-Andi

Loveseat Upholstery 101

I decided that our 2-year-old Room & Board Jasper sofa was not going to fit in our new living room. Though stylish and comfortable, it was 86” from end-to-end. The traditional Victorian parlor in our new place is long and skinny, with a fireplace in the middle of the room. It is a fact that the Victorians were not consumers of anything overstuffed or sectional—their rooms were not proportioned to fit super-sized furniture. Nervous that it would be hard to unload on Craigslist, I posted Jasper early for $700 to test the waters. It sold in a matter of hours, and there were 5 women chompin’ at the bit to buy it. So, three weeks ago, we happily found ourselves without a sofa and with a giant workspace in our living room.  

I quickly parlayed my $700 in sofa money back into another Craigslist buy: a $60 camelback loveseat that I bought from two hipsters in a 4^thfloor walkup. I rented a City Car Share truck for 90 minutes (cost: around $8.00) and brought it home. My inspiration in buying this sofa was the image above from my design Bible, Domino: The Book of Decorating.

For the next three weeks I stripped the loveseat. It had not been recovered in 70+ years, and the insides were musty, dusty, a little moldy, and generally gross. Dean complained that the loveseat gave him a respiratory illness, which is easy to believe. It had originally been covered with pink velvet, but somewhere along the line someone had dyed it dark green without removing the fabric from the frame. The green dye seeped through all of the layers and obviously sat in the bowels of the loveseat for many months, causing some erosion of the natural fibers. Nasty stuff. I would think twice before stripping another piece of furniture in my main living space.

I extracted about 800 tacks, found a 1983 coin from Hong-Kong, a bunch of vintage Number 2 pencils, and some Macy’s tags buried in the depths of the loveseat. From this forensic evidence I deduced that a well-travelled tween had this loveseat in her pink room, before the hipsters took possession.

I took notes as I stripped the piece, hoping to have a road map for reassembling it. I also saved a few of the gross pieces of green velvet from the seat back and arms to use as patterns for my new fabric. Unfortunately, this involves keeping that gross fabric in a corner of my living room for the foreseeable future.

I also went to Cushion Works in the Mission District and picked out my supplies for re-construction. I got some luxurious waxed Ruby Twine for tying springs, a large spool of jute webbing, and 10 yards each of really beautiful burlap and cotton batting. The supplies are so earthy, strong, beautifully made—I have really enjoyed interacting with these materials. This all cost $80.

The crown jewel of my materials was a $225 custom-made cushion, a 4-inch piece of foam coated with a 100% down sleeve. I could have bought a less expensive synthetic cushion, but I am a sucker for a tufted, well-fluffed anything. I ordered the cushion and, in doing so, threw the budget to the geese in our first “Project Nest” mini-project. It’s all about splurging where it counts, I told myself. And the look that I wanted was one of enveloping, sumptuous, Jane-Austen-era sofa wonderfulness. Like these photos below.

In the first days of reassembling I used a webbing stretcher to create a really tight seat base, and then tied all of the springs to the webbing with some guidance from the great book, Complete Step-by-Step Upholstery. After spending approximately 8 hours doing all of this work, I realized that my “road map” had not been so complete. I tied the springs in a way that would not let me re-attach a wood edge piece to the frame. I plummeted into panic, until patient and problem-solving Dean suggested an alternative way of mounting the edge piece on “shims.” I was satisfied with his solution, but the scare caused me to take a step back and really assess all of the work that I have done to this point.

I decided to put my special cushion on top of the springs I had already tied, to get an idea of how the proportions of the loveseat were developing. To my horror, the cushion looked much loftier than I had envisioned, and seemed agonizingly high in comparison with the back of the loveseat. I cried. I spent $225 dollars on that damn cushion! And how many hours working on this loveseat? About 20 so far! All for it to look like a giant toadstool!

Again, Dean and I talked through our options: retying all of the springs much tighter so the cushion would sit lower, or removing all of the springs and having the cushion rest on a webbing deck, or scrapping the cushion and simply having the springs form a tight seat covered with foam.  Then a funny thing happened. The sofa started to look much more normal to us, after we looked at it for a while and surfed the net for some more reference images. Even though the cushion is pretty high in the air, it looked antique, comfortable, eccentric, and one-of-a-kind. Testing it proved it was comfortable, and the armrests feel like they are at a good height when sitting on the cushion. So we are going to move forward with the loveseat as it is. On the emotional rollercoaster of loveseat upholstery, this was a peak. We went out to Thai food and I had a beer.

What do you think of the project thus far? Do the proportions look weird to you? We will continue to post progress shots….

Andi