When you buy a piece of fabric do you really think about what you have bought? I choose by colour, by pattern or simply by the feel of the cloth but little else crosses my mind except what I'm going to make with it. So it's come as quite a surprise that when you do all these processes yourself it's actually very time-consuming.
I'm reupholstering an old chair, one my mother bought from a junk shop and re-covered for me about 30 years ago. It's a sentimental project with more than a passing nod to my ancestry in the furniture business. I wanted to truly personalise the chair and what better way to do it than with fabric I had printed myself?
Once I had settled on a colour (at least two weeks agonising over that) I then spent several hours dyeing a couple of metres of linen union. Having spent all that time colouring I then proceeded to apply discharge paste to bleach out a pattern. Then it all had to be washed again. It's taken around 6 hours so far and that's not including drying time. It would have been so much easier to buy some lovely fabric off the shelf but not nearly as satisfying.
There's more work to do before the fabric makes it onto the chair but that will have to wait until next week.
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