Series editors' preface - Wood Tools

Figure 3.1 A late sixteenth century folding armchair,
Spanish, walnut, with quilted sling style seat
(Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, gift of George
Blumenthal, 1942)
Shallow tufting, an eighteenth century practice,
served to hold fills in place as stitches
went through all upholstery layers. These were
sometimes purely functional and sometimes
more decorative.
By the middle of the eighteenth century,
upholstery structures were quite technically
advanced and more complex than ever before.
They consisted of multiple layers of fillings of
different densities separated from each other
and contained by various types of woven
cloths. Full advantage could be taken of the different
qualities of different fills. Denser, less
resilient, fills were used near the base of the
structure with less dense and more resilient fills
closer to the top cover providing more comfort
(a)
(b)
Upholstery materials and structures 99
Figure 3.2 (a) blind stitch, used to build the depth of
an upholstered seat; (b) top stitch, shown here above a
row of blind stitches, is used to bring the edge
outwards and form the roll edge of an upholstered seat
for the sitter. An example can be seen in the
wing chairs of the mid-eighteenth century (e.g.
Figure 1.17). The rounded edges of the seat rail
and inner wings were formed with densely
packed straw or dried grass encased in narrow
strips of linen and hemp cloth tacked under
tension to form a firm roll-edge that did not distort
during use or from the tension of the overlying
layers (particularly leather). The well
created in the middle of the seat and wings was
fitted with a less dense filling for purposes of
comfort. The loose filling was evenly distributed
and held with very large stitching thread
passed through a foundation of stretched linen
and webbing, and then covered (including the
roll edge) with a filling cover, held under