Reupholstering the family milking chair

I wanted to spend more time with my Dad and learn more of his "Daddy-mend-fix" skills so I asked if we could do a reupholstery project together. He got the old family Milking Chair down from the attic and suggested we changed the old mustard coloured corduroy to something more to my liking.

The chair is something of a sentimental heirloom, with a great family history. My aunt bought it and would sit in it whilst milking her twin boys. The chair was then passed to my mum who milked me and my sister, and then my sister had it to milk her two girls. It has now passed to me, and although I have no children, I am looking forward to having my own memories added to the chair's history now I've reupholstered it with my Dad.

what we did

We stripped the chair right back to the wooden frame and found there was a half penny from 1971 placed inside the right arm.

Dad had a vague recollection that my aunt had reupholstered the chair herself around that year. What a great treasure to find, and now it's my turn. So I added my own penny for 2014 as the year I reupholstered the chair.

Found a half penny and added a penny to show the years the chair has been reupholstered

We re-webbed the seat bottom and back with stronger modern synthetic webbing and used a special tool called a 'Webbing Stretcher' to get the webbing as taught as possible.

On the seat we interweaved the webbing to spread the pressure evenly and lessen the potential of the webbing sagging over time from all the sitting.

Re-webbing an arm chair with synthetic webbing

I sewed the springs to the webbing by hand, using a hooked upholstery needle. It was a bit fiddly and took time to make sure they were well tied down with the string so that they felt even and not lumpy when sat on. The horsehair and wadding went on top and we smoothed it down and contained it all with some cotton fabric.

I tried out a few different fabric ideas and spent some time (and a fair bit of money) in John Lewis choosing some proper good quality upholstery fabric. The main fabric is Den duck egg and the Tartan is Moon Kincraig - Glacier.

Old pattern pieces laid out as templates

I found it really helpful to use the old pattern pieces as templates to cut out the new pieces, and also to work out the order we should be attching each piece. It took a while to attach, undo certain parts and reattach some areas to make sure no raw edgers were seen and the lines all matched up.

We covered the whole chair in light weight cotton, using it as both our practice layer and to contain all the wadding, giving it a smooth under-layer ready for the top layer.

With all the hard work we had to have a few sit downs for testing purposes, obviously.

We did actually have to check the seat was smooth and there were no lumps in the wadding before we attch the top fabric. We did a fair bit of back and forth adding and teasing and squshing down bits in the middle and edges and corners.