Dollhouse: Wing back chair

This post will be a bit of a quasi tutorial and lessons learned along the way.  Sometimes you have to make something a few times before you get it right.

I saw this wing back chair image on Pinterest and was thoroughly charmed by it.   I followed it to the original blog post on Cinderella Moments where the blogger links to a pdf of a pattern for the chair.  It’s actually the assembly instructions for a kit but it essentially includes a template of the chair parts.

I thought I would have a go at it and I will say my results were mixed.  And after looking at the chairs Cinderella Moments created I’m tempted to think she may have played with the scale a bit.  Which is what I did the second time around.   Let me show you what I mean.

The chair on the right is my first attempt using the template as is.  It looked too skinny and too tall.   I made some modifications to the height of the back and sides as well as how I assembled it.

I also switched up the material used for the chair parts.  In the first attempt I used a thin sheet of bass wood for the pieces.  I then painted them white because I didn’t want the tan of the wood showing through the white upholstery material.  Painting caused the pieces to curl a bit.  On the second chair I used chipboard, which in addition to not warping, was easier to cut out with my X-Acto knife.

Side note:  It wasn’t until well in assembly that I remembered that I needed two back pieces.

I couldn’t find a sheet of chipboard at my local craft store but I did find a package of chipboard tags that worked just fine.

In order to pad the back and seat I bought an inexpensive sponge from the $1 store.  I had to cut away the scrubby part but it worked out perfectly.  Again – lesson learned from the first one was to use foam instead of multiple layers of batting.  The seat in the first attempt just didn’t have enough loft.  I did cover the sponge with one layer of batting (actually it’s the stuff you use for hot pads or oven mitts) just to hide the yellow.

In the next picture you can see the various stages of covering the chair parts.

The material I used to cover the chair is a vintage hand towel that had a few holes in it so I didn’t mind sacrificing it.  I love the scale of the diamond shapes of the weave.

Another tip – starch the heck out of your fabric before cutting out.  It made it much easier to cut and to glue into place.

In addition to the damaged tea towel I used I also used the legs off of the cheap dollhouse furniture my friend gave me.  There was no salvaging the chair itself because the proportions were weird, not to mention it was cheaply made, but the legs could be reused.

I removed the legs and sprayed them with a shellac primer (remembering the awful red bleed through when I was painting some of the other pieces) then painted them with some acrylic paint I had on hand.  A little trick I used to paint the legs was to lay down some double sided tape and the tape the legs upside down so I could paint the visible sides easily.

Of course not everyone is going to have a stash of crappy dollhouse furniture to pillage for parts but you can find 1:12 scale dollhouse furniture parts easily.

I used a vintage hankie that had some staining, so thereby could be used as scrap, to add some trim to the chair and to create a lumbar pillow.   Save those less than perfect vintage pieces because you never know when they  might come in handy.

The thing about restoring a dollhouse I love the most is creating the furnishings.  Are they perfect?  No.  But I love the creative process in making them.

If you want to attempt to recreate this chair here is a link to the template I tweaked.   If you print the template on an 8 1/2″ x 11″ piece of paper it will be to scale.  I just have the template and not the instructions but I think you can figure it out by looking at the pictures.  If you have any questions about how I assembled the chair let me know in the comments and I’ll get back to you.