Upholstery Tidbits

Each of us in the upholstery trade, whether  advanced professional, or beginning do-it-yourselfer, has tiny tidbits of information that would be helpful for others to know. Upholstery is not a self-enclosed trade. Many people come into this trade with a wide variety of backgrounds, skills, and interests. Even a rank beginner, who may have a wide depth of knowledge in other areas of his/her life, may learn or discover new or better ways of doing something, of supplies to use, that other more experienced professionals may never have thought of. In this society new materials are constantly being developed. Some of these may be useful to the upholstery trade. OR a person may have many skills in other trades or professions that might improve some of the upholstery methods. Which leads me to these thoughts

Today I'm repairing a couple of feather throw pillows. The pillows match the client's sofa, which she has had for about fifteen years. Because the feathers are coming throw the covers, the client wants to have the feathers replaced with a soft dacron filling. As I take the down ticking inner cover out of the outter cover, the multitude of feathers that escaped the ticking cover are all over the inside of the fabric cover. Because many of the feathers are stuck to, or starting to penetrate the fabric cover, the job of simply replacing the filling becomes more complicated and time consuming. It is a tedious task of pulling each feather loose from the cover. Consequently, I realized that I should have charged more for this job. However, when I took in the order I hadn't even thought about it being more work to restuff a feather throw pillow.

As I thought about that, I had an idea that this is a valuable bit of knowledge, but there's not enough information here to write an article. It's just a little tidbit of knowledge that would be useful to know. With this came a realization that there are a lot of little tidbits of upholstery knowledge that would  be good to remember and to share. These tidbids need to be easy to share and easy to find. So, I'm thinking about what would be needed to set up an "Upholstery Tidbits" section on this website. Perhaps something like a "classified adds" module, that is customized for this use, might be workable. I'll have to do some research and see what I can find.