Monteith Upholstery and Restorations

07/25/2026

The unspoken rule of hidden quality you may not know about.

You must always serge the freaking edges of your pattern pieces before sewing them together!!! Fabric frays and nobody likes string, and tangled messes. If you serge the edge of the fabric you do multiple things both for the quality of your end product and for yourself as a maker.

By serging the edges you prevent loose ends inside whatever you are sewing from forming a tangled mess later on. It helps add stability to the edge of your fabric. Floppy/ stretchy fabric ain’t so floppy/stretchy now and will be easier to sew without fighting to make sure your top and bottom pieces are both stretched the same amount while sewing.

And for you as a maker. You literaly save so much time not fussing about with a mess of loose string everywhere or getting caught on things while you sew

Yes it’s more effort, yes it’s more thread, but it’s also more about the end product quality. If you want cheap trash then fine, just skip serging all together and make it like you don’t care.
But if you want to do something properly in a way that lets people you care about every detail they can see and also the ones they can’t. Then serge your freaking edges on all your pattern pieces!

If you don’t have a serger or other industrial machines like do; there is a way to use the zig zag stitch on most residential machines you can use, But that’s another video for another time

07/23/2026

If you are seeing this you have elite taste. Here we specialize in repairing and building things in the niche world of furniture and you have found a full minute of no trending audio/ natural shop sounds from a traditional Upholsterer stripping down an antique sofa frame.

Drop a follow and come along to see more content about furniture, antiques, history, repair/ restoration and how they all mix together in the world of Monteith Upholstery & Restorations

07/23/2026

If you are seeing this you have elite taste in building things and the niche world of furniture and have found a full minute of no audio/ natural shop sound of a traditional Upholsterer stripping down an antique sofa frame.

Drop a follow and come along to see more content about furniture, antiques, history, repair/ restoration and how they all mix together in the world of Monteith Upholstery & Restorations

07/23/2026

I bet you didn’t know this about antique furniture!

Did you know that regardless of age some furniture (antiques and brand new) will have faux wooden back legs.

Not faux as in fake/not real, but faux as in copy of a more desirable and special wood. For as long as furniture has been made good speciality woods in dark colour or figured grain have always been more expensive and desirable than common species used more for structural use.

Even 200-400+ years ago it was common to take the “good wood” and reserve it for the best parts that will show and something that would be less noticeable would be made in a different cheaper wood and painted or stained to match the high end show wood made out of the expensive lumber.

On this specific antique you can see the ornate carved legs are done in a heavy mahogany and the back legs are a totally different wood. If the builder didn’t want to use more of the expensive mahogany on the back legs that are less likely to be seen they would do one of two things. Splice a short length of the good wood together with the cheaper frame wood. OR completely omit the use of the good wood and the full length of the back leg from top to bottom would be just the cheaper wood and the visible part painted or stained to look the same species of the expensive wood (that is what was done here on this sofa)

This is common to see on furniture that’s 400 years old all the way up to today. So you can have the most expensive high end piece of furniture or a piece of 20th century mass produced furniture and the back legs could be painted to look like the same fancy wood as the front.

And if you did know that then congratulations!
But if you didn’t know that then I hope you took the time to read all of this and will do your own research on historical woodworking as well as upholstery.

You never know what you might learn.

Cheers
Monty

07/16/2026

Amidst all the forest fire smoke I found a patch of fire w**d growing behind one of the out buildings here. Luckily they smell nothing like smoke or fire.

They got their name for being a hearty rhizome rooted plant known to be one of the first things to start sprouting in a post fire ravaged landscape.

I will be collecting the seeds from these beauties this year to spread all over the fileds along with more milkw**d as they smell lovely and grow up to 9 foot tall.

07/15/2026

07/10/2026

This happy set made its way home today. Fully stripped back to frames and re built. Late 1920’s set now ready to face a new century of sitters.

Forgive the amature rushed photos. I realized I didn’t have any good pictures of the finished pieces until just before the client arrived to pick them up so I took what I could as we loaded them in the moving van.

Another living room set rescued and preserved to be cherished by a family who enjoy it and trusted my niche furniture work shop to do what no other upholstery shops in my area can or want to do.

As a specialist in antique furniture and traditional upholstery there are few shops around and none similar for hundereds of miles or even kilometers that practice the old artful ways of hand tied springs with hand stitched stuffings.

While I do also practice modern upholstery with the new materials available it’s few and far between now that you can find an upholsterer around here that can also re build an antique in the traditional ways properly.

Which is a shame. Because a 100 or 200 year old chair didn’t survive all that time just to be tossed out because people forgot how to properly do the work to fix and re build it.

This is the kind of work I look forward to teaching people how to do in the near future.

Cheers
Monty

07/03/2026

I joke I work in a one man self imposed sweat shop, but ouch it really does feel like a sweat shop here the past few days with the 30* and above heat.

Too poor for air conditioning to be fit into the building so cheers to the folks who invented electric fans and bless the 1927 Emerson Electric fan in my shop that has a prop blade fast as an aircraft taking off that’s helping keep it tolerable in the shop.

Cheers from a melting Monty.
Keep cool folks. The world is burning but we can still save some things from destruction.