The story of a leather chair

This sorry old chair was destined for landfill so we rescued it and took it home. Trouble is, patching up leather is a tricky old job and we’ve sat and looked at each other for months and months without quite knowing where to start.

Parts of this chair – mostly back and sides, are in pretty good shape. Other bits, as you can see from our pics, are, well, to put it plainly, knackered. We thought of completely removing the leather from the arms and seat and replacing them, but the trouble with this is it takes far too much time, and also loses a lot of lovely of old leather. So we decided to save as much as we could and see if we could patch and appliqué ourselves out of a tricky spot:

Step 1

We removed a length of the studs to allow us to firmly and neatly attach a new patch of fabric. Happily this turned out to be much easier than it looked as only about 1 stud in 7 was actually attached to the chair – they’re more of a decorative trimming than anything else and obligingly come away with a little gentle persuasion from the tip of a screw driver, so we’re off to a good start. Tip: keep everything you remove from your piece of furniture in one box or jar – this saves loads of time spent fumbling about looking for lost pins or screws when it’s time to put everything back together.

Step 2

Attach your new piece of fabric with the help of a staple gun. We used an electric one, only about £20 from Amazon and probably one of our most useful bits of kit. We also used a lovely piece of old vintage blanket as our patch; quite thick, a bit like felt, and very easy to use here. It seems to just take to any shape, stretching and moulding wherever you need to cover an awkward shape – most obliging.

Step 3

Pin the fabric to your chair, smoothing it to follow any curves (or disguise lumps and bumps!), then cut the patch to your chosen shape.

Step 4

Lift the fabric away from the chair and apply a good coating of a heavy duty fabric adhesive, we used Gutermann Fabric Glue and Textile Adhesive, good strong stuff. Gently smooth your fabric down onto the glued area and wipe any excess glue away with a damp sponge.Leave to dry.

Step 5

Sew your fabric down onto your chair. This gives extra staying power to edges otherwise prone to fraying, and adds a nice decorative touch. If you’re sewing onto a very thick material as we were here, it’s best keep your stitch simple and save your fingers. As you can see from the pic, we wore rubber gloves for this job. No it’s not a fetish thing. We find a good old marigold really helps to get a grip on the needle – very handy when trying to pull an obstinate needle through several layers of something thick. A thimble comes in handy too.