The drop-in dining seat is where every upholsterer starts. It’s the cheapest piece of upholstery to ruin (about £10 of materials), the simplest construction to learn — no springs, no stitched edges, no buttoning — and the most teachable object in the trade. Every Greenwood Upholstery student does ten of these in their first month; you should do at least five before moving on.
What we mean by a ‘drop-in seat’ is a Georgian or Victorian dining chair with a removable seat-pad: a small wooden frame, webbed across, lightly stuffed and covered in fabric, that drops into a rebate cut into the chair’s seat rails. The pad is held in by gravity and friction alone — lift it out, turn the chair over, and you’ll see the rebate. Most Georgian dining chairs are drop-in, and so are the later Victorian, Edwardian and modern copies; the technique here applies to all of them with only minor variation.
The drop-in is the only piece of upholstery you can completely ruin and not feel bad about. The materials are about £10, the time is half a day, and the chair frame underneath is unaffected. You can throw your first attempt away without consequence — that’s worth more than the chapter you’re about to read.
What you need
Materials, per seat
- 4 m of 50 mm jute webbing (about £4)
- 0.5 m² of hessian, 12 oz (about £3)
- 200 g horsehair, or a 50 mm slab of 32 kg/m³ foam cut to size (£4 either way)
- 0.5 m² cotton felt or Dacron wadding (£1)
- 0.5 m² calico (£3)
- 0.7 m show fabric (£15–100, your choice)
- 0.5 m² bottoming cloth (£2)
- 50 g of 13 mm tacks (£3)
Total: £35–120, depending almost entirely on the show fabric. The rest comes to about £20. Not sure how much fabric to buy? Use the fabric calculator.
Tools (see the toolkit): a magnetic tack hammer, ripping chisel, web strainer, scissors, skewers and a regulator. No sewing machine, no long needles — the drop-in is genuinely a starter project.
Doing all six chairs from a dining set at once? Buy in bulk — 25 m of webbing, 5 m² of hessian, 1 kg of horsehair — and you’ll save about 30% on the per-seat price.
Stage 1 Strip the pad
Lift the seat pad out of the chair — it should come freely; if not, work a thin blade around the rebate until it lifts. On the underside you’ll find either webbing tacked straight to the frame (English construction) or a hessian dust cover hiding it (continental). Either way, take the bottom layer off first, then strip the show fabric from the top in reverse order.
Save the old show fabric. Flat-laid on the bench it’s the best cutting pattern you’ll get for an irregular pad. If the shape is complicated, photograph the pad in place before you start — that photo is your reference for putting it back. Then inspect the bare frame: usually 25 mm softwood, so check for splits, broken corners or too much old tack damage. A pad-frame is far easier to mend or replace than the chair itself; a beech blank and a couple of butt-joints fixes a bad one for £5.
With the old work off, drop the bare frame back into the chair. It should sit flush in the rebate with about 5 mm of clearance all round — that’s the space for your new upholstery. Much more than that and you’ll need a thicker pad.
Stage 2 Webbing
This is the simplest webbing layout in the book: three strands front-to-back, three side-to-side, interlaced — six in total. Use the five-tack pattern at every end (three tacks through a single layer, fold the end back, two more through the doubled fold). Tension to roughly 12–15% stretch, tighter than a sprung seat, because here the webbing carries the whole load alone.
Tack onto the top face of the pad-frame, not the edge. The top face is what shows from above once the pad is in its rebate; the underside is for the bottoming cloth. Tacking the top face is the standard convention and gives the cleanest result. Reckon on 25–30 minutes once you have the rhythm — twice that on the first attempt.
Stand the webbed frame on edge and tap the centre of the webbing with a finger. The pitch should be like a slack drum head. If it slaps, you’ve under-tensioned — re-strain it.
Stage 3 Stuffing
A drop-in doesn’t need a stitched-edge first stuffing — the chair’s rebate defines the seat’s edge for you — so this stage is straightforward. A layer of hessian over the webbing, tacked to the frame edges; a single layer of stuffing over that; then cotton felt or Dacron wadding on top to smooth the surface. Aim for about 40–50 mm of total depth from the top of the webbing — comfortable, but not so much that the pad won’t drop back into the rebate. Build it up, check the fit, trim back if needed.
The modern alternative is foam: a 40 mm slab of 32 kg/m³ foam cut to the pad shape, glued to the hessian with spray adhesive, plus a Dacron wrap. Faster than horsehair and comfortable for a decade — right for a modern dining chair, not for a heritage Georgian one. (Unsure which foam? The foam & cushion tool gives the grade.)
We use horsehair for anything we’d call a heritage piece (roughly pre-1950) and foam for anything modern. The customer’s expectation usually matches: heritage owners want horsehair; modern owners want foam.
Stage 4 Top cover
Drop-in covers are the most beginner-friendly fabric work in the trade, because there are no visible seams — the cover is a single piece of fabric folded around the pad. Cut it using the old cover as a template, or, if there isn’t one, to the pad’s plan size plus 50 mm of tacking allowance all round.
Lay the fabric face-down on the bench, lay the wadding-topped pad face-down on it, then fold each side up and tack to the underside — front and back first, sides next, corners pleated last. Use a box pleat at each corner (see trimming & finishing) for a clean result. Pull the fabric tight as you tack: tightness is the whole difference between a saggy finish and a crisp one. Use 6 mm fine tacks underneath, or 10 mm for extra grip on a thick fabric, every 25 mm.
With velvet, run the pile the same way across all six chairs in a set — we have it point toward the front of the chair, so it lies smooth from a seated diner’s view. Mark every panel as you cut.
Stage 5 Bottoming cloth & refit
Cut a piece of black bottoming cloth to the underside of the frame with about 30 mm overhang, fold the edges under, and tack it down — one neat layer covering both the webbing tacks and the cover tacks. About ten minutes a pad. Then drop the finished pad back into the rebate: it should sit flush, no gaps at the edge and no proud high spots. If it won’t fit, the usual cause is over-stuffing — lift it, compress the stuffing, refit — or a fabric thicker than the original taking up more clearance than you allowed.
That’s the job done. The seat looks new, the chair sits properly, and you move on to chair number two.
Sign and date the bottoming cloth in indelible marker — one signature, one date, per pad. The next upholsterer, twenty years from now, will appreciate it.
From the workshop
The set of six we still see every five years
A regular customer in Halifax brought us six Georgian dining chairs in 2003 to re-cover the drop-in seats. They’ve come back every five years since. The fabric lasts about that long under daily-dinner use; the pads underneath haven’t been re-stuffed once in twenty-two years.
Each visit is the same six pads on the bench: lift the cover, replace the wadding that’s compressed, fit new fabric, bottoming cloth, refit. Total job, a morning. We charge £60 a chair, materials included, and the customer brings biscuits. It’s the most reliable repeating small job in our calendar, and we look forward to it.
Did you know
Why drop-ins survive when stuffover doesn’t
Drop-in seats from the 1750s frequently survive in working order today, original webbing and stuffing still in place. Stuffover seats from the same period — where the cover wraps the chair rails directly — rarely do. The reason is protection: the wooden rebate shields the pad’s edges from the wear that destroys stuffover seats, and the lift-out pad encourages gentle bench re-covering rather than the in-place tacking that slowly wrecks stuffover rails. The drop-in is, structurally, a piece of disposable upholstery inside a long-life chair — and the design has worked for 300 years.
Common mistakes
Drop-in errors that catch beginners out
- Over-stuffing — the pad won’t fit back in the rebate. Always check the fit before you fit the cover, and trim the stuffing where needed.
- Tacking the wrong face — tack the top face of the frame, not the edges. A chair with edge-tacked webbing looks wrong.
- A slack cover — it should be visibly tight. Pull until your hands hurt, tack, then pull the next side. A loose cover sags within months.
- Tacks too big — 13 mm tacks split the thin pad-frame. Use 6 or 8 mm fine tacks underneath.
- Skipping the bottoming cloth — the customer always tips the chair over to look. Always.
Six chairs in an afternoon, a satisfied customer, a delighted apprentice. The next project is the drop-in’s elder sibling — the stuffover dining chair, where the cover wraps the chair rails directly and the techniques get one degree more demanding.