DIY Stamped Fabric Chairs

Despite having been very excited about this project it still took me many months to finally buckle down and get it done.

I made my stamps in June 2016 with the intention of using them to decorate fabric and reupholster my dining chairs. I thought I would do it right away when the stamps were done but a year past and I never got around to it.

You may or may not know that I really dislike having people in my space and have therefore barely had anyone over to our apartment. If it’s just Ryan and I then I can live with the space getting a bit messy for a day or two but anytime someone else will be over I stress myself out thinking that they will judge me for not being clean enough or for having a poorly decorated space. In reality, I’m pretty sure no one cares and since I keep things quite neat and clean there is very little to judge on anyway.

All that being said, we had a few friends over (for the first time since living there) on Canada Day. After very thoroughly cleaning everything in anticipation of their arrival I still couldn’t help but think that the chairs as they were kind of ruined the clean look that I was going for. That was all the motivation I needed to finally get this project moving.

The next morning I dragged Ryan out to a few stores to help me choose fabric and paint colors. He didn’t really share my vision but helped to look anyway. Fabricland and Michael’s are some of my favorite stores and I don’t go nearly often enough anymore.

To refinish 2 chairs we used:

-Leftover white paint from when we refinished the table

-1.5 meters of fabric
-2 small bottles of paint (appropriate for fabric)
-Paint brushes I already had
-A hammer, screwdriver, needle nose pliers and staple gun

I have to admit, I expected this to be much more difficult than it was. Taking everything apart and painting the frame was very simple and didn’t take too long. Stamping the fabric, however, was much more time consuming.

I pre-cut the fabric to the proper size so I could wrap the cushion and staple it to the underside. Ideally when stamping there should be an ink pad or a roller to quickly and evenly apply the paint. Also in an ideal world the stamp face itself would be level. Unfortunately for me, because I hand carved my stamps from clay the faces aren’t 100% even and that left me with the lengthy process of painting the stamp every time I wanted to use it, and I used it a lot.

With the fabric laid out flat I would paint the stamp and then gently roll and press it into the fabric. To make the process that much longer, I also had to be quite gentle since the clay stamps are fragile. The type of paint I used also built up slightly on the stamp and would need to be peeled off after every 5-10 stamps or I risked it all peeling off on the fabric and leaving chunks of rubbery paint.

In hindsight I would most certainly carve my stamps from rubber as that would most likely cut out pretty much all the issues I ran into. While stamping the second set of fabric with the whale I actually broke the stamp in half. If I was almost done it wouldn’t have bothered me so much to have to stamp each half separately and hope they lined up, but I was only starting the first of 3 fabric pieces. As a quick remedy I glued the two pieces together and onto an unloved lid from the kitchen.

After 2 days of stamping, painting and stapling I managed to come out the other side with a product I absolutely love. Having never done this before I had high hopes but I was also prepared to be disappointed if it didn’t go well. I’m so pleased to say it looks even better than I imagined.