Eames in progress

Well, I officially failed Nablopomo.  But sometimes, you just have to eat chicken and go see the new Harry Potter Movie.  Sorry folks.  Go easy on me.  I even had this post drafted and almost complete.  Ha ha.  Oh well, it's sort of like I posted it for November 25 because I haven't gone to bed yet...

I posted before pics of an Eames-style (authenticity undecided) lounge chair that Joel creatively acquired this past spring.  It's not done yet, but we did have an intense weekend of working on it a while back and it's getting close.  Perhaps Joel's roommates, who have been watching it sit in a relatively untouched pile on the floor lately, can attest to the fact that a) it's looking good, and b) that there is still a bit of work to be done.

We got the (off-white, buttery soft) vinyl through our designer friend Dawn of Dawn Stiles Design.  We wanted a high-quality almost-leather feel but weren't sure we wanted to pay for leather since we were going to tackle this job ourselves.  It would be much more tragic to ruin an expensive piece of leather than an only moderately expensive piece of vinyl.

We thought about getting it done professionally, but that's not nearly as fun I don't think.  So, after ripping it apart we set out to put it back together again.  In a lot of ways, it was as simple as tracing the pieces of fabric that we had removed on to the vinyl and cutting them out.  We chose to get buttons made by a professional upholsterer because we figured they would look waaaayyyy better and they only cost about $2 each. 

So, after cutting out the vinyl, we punched holes (with a hammer and a nail) into the vinyl where the buttons needed to be threaded through.  Now the tough part...we had to thread the buttons through the thick layers of foam and batting and out the back of the chair, but we didn't have an upholsterers needle.  At first it seemed impossible, but eventually with the help of a chopstick and a lot of grunt work, we managed to figure out how to get it through.

This is what the shells looked like after the buttons had been threaded, but before we started stretching and stapling.

After the buttons were in place, it was time to stretch and staple.  The first thing we stapled was the strings on the buttons so that they would be nice and tight.

We were careful about our first staples because if we stretched too much on one side it would make the buttons off-center.  We stapled opposite corners all around, continually checking to make sure the buttons were centred.  We bought an electric stapler for the job, which in the end worked out ok, but at first caused some troubles.  Mostly because the staples got loaded in the wrong way and are now forever jammed in the handle.  Because of the malfunction I insisted that we wear eye protection.  This is me in Joel's 3d glasses, making a cranky face to communicate the wayward-staple anxiety that I was having.

After I got over it, the electric stapler worked like a charm and nobody got staples in their face, eyes, or fingers.  After centering the vinyl and stapling the straight edges we worked on the corners.  They were probably the trickiest but Joel was a champ at folding them evenly.

Each chair has a rim of piping around the edge of the wooden shell.  It's hard to visualize without seeing the chair, but basically you staple the piping to the wooden shell and then the cushion fits in overtop.  This is nice because the sewing is fairly straightforward.  I haven't worked with piping on cushions before and I don't think it would be my idea of a good time.  I like sewing but I'm far from meticulous. So this is me sewing the piping.

And here is the cushion alllmost ready.  At this point Joel and I were still speaking and on good terms.  No major DIY blowouts yet.  It's one of the ways we are testing our relationship before the big day.  Ha ha.  Just kidding.  Sort of.

When our friend Dawn saw it she sighed with relief and told us she was so worried it wouldn't work out, but doesn't it look good so far?