Take Before Pictures Of Your Upholstery Project

A picture says a thousand words, even in your upholstery project

Let’s talk about taking pictures of your projects before you begin tearing them down. Bill and I have always taken pictures of every upholstery project before we begin to tear down on an upholstery project and we also take pictures during tear down. Having the pictures gives us something to reference back to.  It’s especially important when you’re new to upholstery. We don’t remember the details as well as we think we will.   Sometimes pieces would sit for a week before we’d start upholstering them again, so having the pictures were always helpful.

How did that corner look?

You will want to make sure that you get pictures of all the little details of your upholstery project.  Details like folds on the corners or the number of pleats that are on the arm. Where did the cording start and stop? Getting pictures of the thicknesses of your cushion, and how the cushions fit the chair or the sofa. When you’ve re-padded a piece the old cushion is going to fit a little bit differently than it did before. You’ll need to know how those things all went together and how they looked.

As you tear down, you want to take a picture of the attachment points, where did they attach the webbing? Where did they attach the cording? How thick was the padding that they had on the inside back or on the arms? Did they have pleats on the corners of the outside back, how many?  All these details are things that might be important.

Did they use cotton or foam?

If you’re new to upholstery, sometimes you don’t know what things typically look like. Maybe you’re making changes. Do you want it to look exactly the same as it did before? So make sure you take pictures of all the details. It’s also a good idea when you take a picture of the padding, to use a little ruler and you put the ruler next to the padding so you know how thick it was. You also want to know what padding did they use. Once you throw everything away you don’t know what padding was in there. Did it have Dacron, was there some foam? Those are all things that are handy to have answers to with photos you’ve taken before teardown.

Now I did always save the fabric pieces. The fabric pieces are good to reference. Sometimes you might need to have a reference for a cut, so take pictures of the cuts and keep the pieces of fabric. So you can see where that cut in the photograph was, but you’ve got the physical piece to see how they made that cut and help it make more sense to you.

So take pictures, take pictures, take pictures. One other thing that we did was print the pictures out on a sheet of paper. We would gang up a group of pictures on the paper and print them out so that I could have a quick reference rather than digging through my phone because if you’re like me you have thousands of pictures on your phone and trying to find just the right one never seems to happen very easily. So go ahead and print the pictures out to give yourself a quick reference.

So I guess you know how important it is to Take Pictures before you tear down your next upholstery project!