If Chapter 1 was the why, this chapter is the what. Before any of the techniques in Part Two will make sense, we need a shared vocabulary for the parts of the chair you're about to build. Upholstery has more named parts than any other furniture craft, and the words come from three different sources — old joinery (rail, stile, stretcher), centuries-old upholstery jargon (scrim, scroll, gimp), and modern manufacturing (zigzag, plinth, boxing). The whole vocabulary is in this chapter and in the back-of-book glossary. Skim once, refer back as often as you need. I've organised the chapter in three passes through the same material, each pass deeper than the last. First, the outsides: the named panels and surfaces you can see on a finished chair. Second, the insides: the cross-section showing every layer between the timber frame and the show fabric. Third, the sequence: the order in which all those layers go on, from a bare frame to a finished piece.
The vocabulary is the same in all three passes; what changes is the angle. By the end of the chapter you'll have a working fluency in the names of the parts, and the rest of the book will read much faster.
Readers of my pay-what-you-want guide Anatomy of a Chair will recognise the diagrams on the next pages — this chapter expands on the same material with two new chair types, a side-by-side traditional vs modern cutaway, and a step-by-step assembly sequence not in Volume Four.
Pass One: The outsides Every upholstered piece is built around a wooden frame. The frame has the same vocabulary as any other piece of joinery: rails are horizontal members, stiles and uprights are vertical members, stretchers tie them together for rigidity. Show-wood is any visible timber on a finished piece — legs, exposed arms, the carved cresting at the top of a dining-chair back. Show-wood is finished and polished and never covered.
Once the frame is upholstered, the surfaces of the chair acquire their own names. The inside back is the upholstered surface you lean against; the outside back is the panel that faces the rear of the room. The inside arm is the part your elbow rests against; the outside arm is the panel that faces outward. The front border (or front rail on some chairs) is the upholstered band below a loose seat cushion.
The wing-back — the textbook chair A wing-back armchair is the upholsterer's textbook piece: every named part you'll find on a sofa or a Chesterfield is on this one chair. Master the names here and the rest of the vocabulary falls into place.
The convention is rigid: inside always means ‘the side that faces a sitter’, outside always means ‘the side that faces the room’. On a wing-back this gives you eight named panels — two inside wings, two outside wings, two inside arms, two outside arms — before you've named the back or the seat. 3
Top of inside back Wing
Inside wing
Outside arm
Decorative nails
Front leg
Front view of an English wing-back. Two wings flare outward from the upper sides of the back to shelter the head from draughts; the arms project outward with a rolled scroll at each front; the seat carries a loose cushion over a sprung platform; turned front legs with decorative nail trim along the outside arms.
The tub chair — one continuous wrap Where the wing-back has separate panels for the inside back and inside arms, the tub chair wraps them all into one continuous curve. Tub chairs are good practice for learning to ease fabric round a curve without pleats; they're also one of the few chair types where the ‘inside arm’ and ‘inside back’ are genuinely the same panel of fabric.
Top of rim (continuous wrap-around)
Outside back Side rail Inside back/arm Loose cushion
Front rail
Front leg
A tub chair: the inside back and inside arms are one continuous curved panel. Fewer pieces of fabric than a wing-back, but each piece has to do more work.
The ottoman — a vocabulary in miniature An ottoman, footstool or pouffe has only three named surfaces — top, border, base — and is the simplest piece in the book. We use ottomans to teach buttoning, deep-stitched edges, and the welt seam, all on a piece small enough to finish in a single workshop session.
Top pad (often deep-buttoned)
Welt seam
Box border
Bun foot
An ottoman with a deep-buttoned top. The simplest piece you'll ever upholster, and one of the most satisfying.
Pass Two: The insides Cut a vertical slice through the seat of an upholstered chair and you see the layers: timber rail at the bottom, fabric at the top, and a small archaeology of materials in between. Each layer does one job. Skip any layer and the next one fails sooner. This is the single most important diagram in the book, and I've drawn it twice — once for traditional construction (which you'll see when you strip any pre-1970 chair) and once for modern foam-and-zigzag construction (which is what you'll find under almost everything made since).
Cutaways always read bottom-up: the timber rail is the foundation, the show fabric is the last thing fitted. The order of the diagram is also the order of construction, which is the subject of Pass Three.
First stuffing
Hessian
Springs
Webbing
Cross-section of a traditional sprung seat. Webbing supports the springs; the springs absorb load; hessian contains the stuffing; the stitched first stuffing gives a firm rim; the second stuffing softens it; felt smooths the surface; calico lets you correct shape before committing to the show fabric.
Top fabric Dacron wrap
Softer foam top
HD foam base
Same scale as the diagram above. Faster to build, cheaper, and comfortable when new — but with no stitched edge to give shape, the foam compresses where you sit and never recovers. A ten-year seat where the traditional seat is a hundred-year one.
DID YOU KNOW · WHY TRADITIONAL CONSTRUCTION LASTS LONGER The single most important difference between the two cutaways isn't the springs; it's the stitched edge. Traditional construction takes the first stuffing of horsehair and pulls it into a rectangular pad with a row of stitches all the way around the rim. The pad has a defined shape that resists compression. Even after a century of use, the rim of a stitched-edge seat is still where the upholsterer put it. Modern foam, by contrast, has no edge structure. The block of foam is the only thing giving the seat its shape, and foam fatigues with use. The dent your body makes in the foam after ten years of sitting is permanent. There's nothing inside the seat that can push back.
Pass Three: The sequence Upholstery is built inside-out. You start with the bare timber frame, work outward through the structural layers (webbing, springs, hessian, stuffing), then the shaping layers (first stuffing stitched into shape, second stuffing, felt), then the test layer (calico), and finally the show fabric. The sequence is fixed: webbing has to go on before springs, stitched edges have to be formed before second stuffing, calico has to go on before show fabric. There's a reason the sequence is fixed: each layer needs the layer below to be in its final position before it can be fitted. You cannot stitch a first-stuffing edge onto something that hasn't been stuffed yet. You cannot fit calico over an unstitched edge and expect the calico to hold the shape. Skip a step and the chair gets worse, not faster.
The most common beginner mistake is to try to skip ahead. If your second stuffing looks lumpy, the answer is almost always that the first-stuffing edges weren't stitched firmly enough.
1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
The five stages of an inside-out build, simplified. Each chapter in Part Two covers one of these stages in detail.
FROM THE WORKSHOP · WHEN A CUSTOMER ASKS HOW LONG IT TAKES The most common question we get when someone first walks into the workshop is ‘how long does it take to upholster a chair?’. The honest answer is somewhere between four hours and forty, depending on which of the diagrams above you're building. A modern foam-and-staple drop-in seat is genuinely a four-hour job. A traditional stuffed-and-stitched wing-back is genuinely a forty-hour one. The piece in front of you is somewhere on that spectrum, and the cutaway tells you where. We sometimes show the customer the two cutaways side by side and let them tell us which one they want.
COMMON MISTAKES · VOCABULARY ERRORS THAT CATCH BEGINNERS OUT Confusing stile and rail. Stiles are vertical, rails are horizontal. The same piece of timber can be a stile in one chair and a rail in another, depending on its orientation in the frame. Calling everything fabric ‘upholstery fabric’. There are at least three named fabrics in a traditional chair — hessian, scrim, calico — before you reach the show fabric on top. Each has a specific weight and a specific job. Saying ‘the cushion’ when you mean ‘the seat’. A cushion is a removable pad. The seat is the fixed upholstered platform underneath it. A wing-back has both. A drop-in dining seat has neither — it has a seat pad, which is something else again.
With the vocabulary in place, we can move on to the workshop itself: where you do the work, what light you need to see what you're doing, and how to set the room up so that thirty years from now your back still works.
The upholsterer's core kit
- Pneumatic staple gun (paid link)
- Magnetic upholstery hammer (paid link)
- Tack & staple lifter (paid link)
- Webbing strainer (paid link)
- Upholstery scissors (paid link)
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