Have one old-but-good upholstered chair full of pink mildew, and two straight chairs with upholstered seats and fronts - all smelling most unpleasant with mildew. Can anyone offer help or suggestions to save these chairs? Many thanks.

hi there Lyban! Sorry to chime in so late in the day; I missed your post earlier. In my experience it would be almost impossible to upholster from the top down instead of bottom-up. The entire process depends on placing quite a bit of weight on the jute webbing, which is stretched tightly across the wooden frame, then softened by the springs. If you try to do it backwards, you can't achieve the same amount of tension and it will sag, plus it will likely put too much stress on the leather cover and stretch it out of shape. Hmmm. The thing is, the hard part about putting a leather cover on is the measurement and pulling to fit. In this case, that has already been done. I really don't think it would be too hard to carefully take off the cover and then rebuild the innards from the ground up. Since you've already cut out the webbing and springs, I'm afraid I don't see any other way to do it and make the chair comfortable and able to take any amount of weight. Be brave! :-) Of course you can just wait to get it done professionally, but it's honestly not that hard to do, and you can just follow the tack holes from the previous job when you put the leather back on. You will need to get new webbing (quite cheap) and a webbing stretcher which are both available at Joanne's Fabrics or online. The sites already listed by others give you some good pointers, and here's a good beginner's book I can recommend with very easy-to-follow instructions and great illustrations: Here is a link that might be useful: Simply Upholstery Step-by-Step

Yes, I'm still amazed that I found this table. One thing I'm excited about is that it is a rectangle. It will replace our oval Queen Anne table with matching chairs. Altho the new table has a cabriole leg, I know for sure I don't want the new chairs to have the same leg. Our DR is part of an L-shaped LR/DR. Once the new table is in place, I will post pictures. Thank you for the many wonderful suggestions. I think the look I'm going for is a little more to the casual side, so not as formal as the chairs with the tufted backs, but not quite as casual as the Wordd Market Kooboo chairs (if that makes any sense).

Related to this, I have an ill-placed window behind our TV that I wanted to block out. The wall there is painted a dark, smokey blue. I tried a shade on the window and just could never find a fabric that I liked. I just wanted the window to disappear. I had a couple of yards of upholstery fabric in a textured, horizontal stripe (mostly gray with some blue and red). I didn't want the color of the fabric to show, but liked the texture, so I painted it with the wall paint, undiluted. From that, I made a simple shade to cover the window and trim; it doesn't rise up by design. It matches exactly the wall, but has a subtle texture that I just love!