Victorian Button Back
Every Victorian Button Back I strip down is in dire need of some TLC, as you will see from the photos.
I removed the outside back of the chair to find an interesting spring which needed to be removed, I’m assuming at sometime the back had started to give so the spring was added to give extra support.
I added new webbing to the back to give the support and placed the back pad back on and re-stitched it into place, finally adding the top fabric and buttons
The seat of the chair felt lumpy so it was highly likely that the seat would need to be taken out, the biggest give away was the hard board that had been nailed into the base of the chair which you can see below left. The photo of the springs are as they were found, the lashings which held them in place were gone and the seat had two lots of webbing where a save job had been done in the past. There is nothing wrong with re-webbing a chair in this way, but this chair was now in desperate need of a complete re-seat.
I managed to re-use the seat pad but new springs were required and the seat pad re-stitched in to place.
Here is a photo of the finished piece recovered in the clients choice of fabric – Kirkby Design, Atlas Collection, Arctic Natural, which is a thin corduroy stripe.
