The Zebra Chair

Let me tell you, this chair was a pain in the butt!  It took a lot of work and cost more than I thought it would (and would normally spend) but I love the end result.

I found the chair on craigslist, where a lady was selling it for $10.  I spent at least two weeks pulling out the many staples and cutting myself on the evil nails (and just letting it sit there in my living room being ugly and torn apart).

THE WORST!

The fluff made me SO itchy!

When I finally got it dismantled, I laid out all of the fabric pieces as a pattern to determine how much new fabric I would need to buy to cover the chair.  There are also plenty of {online guides} for how much fabric you need to upholster different common items.

I found the fabric at {Hancock Fabrics}.  They have a pretty great selection of discount upholstery fabrics!  I was deciding between this brown/white zebra print and a solid sage green.  I figured that a solid would be a lot easier for my first upholstery fabric, but I got brave and decided to try something with a lot more "wow" factor.  If I'm going to spend all this time working on this awful chair, it had might as well be awesome!  I was surprised with myself for even considering the zebra.  If you know me at all you'll know that I'm not really an animal print person, but this just seemed right! I don't know if you can tell in the pictures, but it's a dark brown and white print (not black :)

First I spray painted the legs, using Kilz primer and Rustoleum white spray paint.

Using the old fabric piece as a template, I cut out rough sizes of the fabric I would need.  I put in all new cushioning (the fact that the old stuff made me so itchy seemed sketchy), and just went to work putting stuff on.

Not going to lie-- it's really, really, not perfect.  I got impatient and stopped following the way it was put together originally and just start putting things on where I thought it would work.  It you don't shove your hands in the cracks or look at it too closely I think it looks pretty good. It definitely looks better than it did before!

So will I do another upholstery project? Probably.  I'm going to wait until I forget about what a pain in the butt this one was, though, and can only remember how awesome the result was.