What is calico used for in upholstery?
Calico — muslin in the United States — is a plain cotton cloth fitted over the stuffing before the top cover goes on. It does the work of consolidating the shape: pulled and tacked tight, it compresses the stuffing into its final form and holds it there, so the top cover only has to be dressed over an already finished shape rather than create one. Over the calico goes a layer of wadding, which stops the coarse fibres beneath working through the cover and softens the surface. Skip the calico and the top cover does two jobs badly.
There is one universal rule about cover work: fit everything twice. First in calico (US: muslin), then in show fabric.
Before you cut, the fabric yardage calculator works out the metreage for any piece, with pattern repeats allowed for.
After Chapter 12 (or 13, depending on whether you’re working traditional or modern), the seat has its full shape and bulk in place. What it doesn’t yet have is what the customer actually sees: the visible cover. This chapter walks through the three layers between the structural stuffing and the world — the calico under-cover, the wadding that smooths it, and the show fabric that finishes it — and then corner pleating and the panel order that distinguish a clean cover from a saggy one.
The calico is your dress rehearsal: you fit it carefully, judge the shape, adjust where needed, and only then commit to the show fabric using the calico as both pattern and template. Calico is cheap (about £6 per metre); show fabric is expensive (£40–200 per metre). The maths is obvious. We’ve never met an experienced upholsterer who skips calico; we’ve met many beginners who do, learn the lesson, and never skip it again.
Calico is sold bleached or unbleached. Use unbleached. The bleached version contains optical brighteners that yellow over time and can show through a thin top fabric. Unbleached calico stays the same colour for the chair’s lifetime.
The calico under-cover
Cut a piece of unbleached calico (paid link) large enough to drape over the panel with 100 mm overhang on every side. Drape it on; smooth it down; pull each side gently down to the rail and hold temporarily with skewers (paid link) rather than tacks — the skewers are reusable and let you re-position.
Now adjust. Pull each side a fraction tighter, working around the panel several times. The calico should fit the stuffing pad like a snug, second skin — firm enough that it won’t shift, loose enough that you can feel the pad through it. When you’re happy with the fit, replace the skewers with permanent tacks (10 mm into the rail, every 25 mm along the rail edge).
The calico is now the working surface. Any unevenness in the pad shows through; mark the high spots and low spots with chalk. Now is the time to add a little more wadding (US: batting) where there are dips, or to compress with the heel of your hand where there are mounds. The calico will tighten over the changes; you can keep adjusting until the surface is uniform.
Upholstery skewers are 75 mm-long pins with a small ring at the top. They temporarily hold cover in position while you adjust tension and check the fit, before you commit with tacks. Get a pack of 20; they last forever.
Wadding: the smoothing layer
Between calico and top fabric goes a thin layer of wadding — either traditional cotton felt (paid link) (for traditional builds) or polyester wadding (paid link) (Dacron, for modern). The wadding has no structural job; it just smooths the surface, hides any minor unevenness in the calico, and gives the top fabric a slightly soft ‘hand’ rather than letting it lie flat against the firm pad below.
About 5–10 mm of wadding is usual for a domestic seat. It comes off rolls 1.5 m wide. Cut to fit the panel with no overhang — the wadding doesn’t go down to the rail; it sits within the calico envelope and the top fabric goes over it. A spray-on contact adhesive holds the wadding to the calico if needed; we usually find the friction is enough.
On a traditional chair we use cotton felt over horsehair; on a modern foam piece we use Dacron. Mixing — cotton felt over foam, Dacron over horsehair — produces no obvious problem in service but feels wrong to anyone who knows what they’re touching. Match the tradition.
Top fabric: the show cover
Now the visible work. Cut the show fabric using the calico as your pattern — lay the fitted calico on the flat fabric, mark around it with chalk, add 50 mm of tacking allowance on every side, cut. If the fabric has a pattern, lay it out so the pattern is centred on each panel and runs in the same direction (front-to-back, not side-to-side).
Fitting the show fabric is the calico procedure done again, this time more slowly and with more attention to the visible result. Drape, smooth, skewer, adjust, tack — just as for calico. The advantage now is that you have a known-good fit (the calico) underneath; the show fabric will sit where the calico is.
Use 6 mm fine tacks (paid link) for the visible edge, 10 mm regular tacks for the underside, every 25 mm. On a piece where the show-edge will be hidden by gimp or decorative nails, the tack pattern doesn’t matter visually. On a piece where it will show, space the tacks regularly and drive them flush.
Velvets and other piled fabrics have a direction — the pile lies one way and reflects light differently when viewed from the other. Cut every panel with the pile running the same direction (we conventionally have it running downwards on inside and outside backs, front-to-back on seats). Mark every panel with an arrow as you cut.
How do you fold upholstery fabric at corners?
Fold corners with a box pleat: a triangular fold that gathers the excess cover fabric inward from both sides, leaving one clean vertical line at the corner. The show fabric itself is cut using the fitted calico as the pattern, with 50 mm of tacking allowance on every side.
Where two cover edges meet at a corner of the chair, the excess fabric has to be folded out of the way neatly. The standard technique is the box pleat: a triangular fold that gathers the excess fabric inward from both sides, hidden under the panel where it joins the rail. Done well, the box pleat is invisible to a casual observer; done badly, it’s the first thing the customer notices.
The technique is the same for calico and for show fabric, although the show-fabric pleat is the one that matters visually. Always practise on calico first; once the technique works in calico, it works in show fabric.
The crease on each fold of the pleat needs to be sharp; press it with your thumbnail or with a smooth wooden block. A soft, rounded fold spoils the visual effect and never looks crisp.
Panel order: inside-out, again
Show-fabric panels go on in a fixed order, just as the structural layers do. The principle is the same: each new panel covers the raw edges of the previous one. So inside back lining first, then inside arms, then inside back proper, then seat, then outside arms, then finally outside back. The outside back is always last because it covers the raw edges of every other panel.
Get the order wrong and you’ll have visible raw edges (or visible tack lines) on the finished chair. The order isn’t a matter of opinion; it’s the only sequence that lets each panel hide what the previous one didn’t.
On chairs without arms (a dining chair, a slipper chair) the order simplifies to: inside back, seat, outside back. On chairs with cushions, the cushion is its own independent panel and goes on last of all, after the outside back.
Tools & materials for this job
- Unbleached calico (paid link)
- Upholstery skewers (pack of 20) (paid link)
- Cotton felt wadding (traditional) (paid link)
- Polyester / Dacron wadding (modern) (paid link)
- 6 mm fine tacks (visible edge) (paid link)
- 10 mm tacks (underside) (paid link)
- Magnetic tack hammer (paid link)
- Tailor’s chalk (paid link)
Years ago, when I was self-employed and working alone, I fitted the seat panel of a wing-back before the inside back lining went on. The seat looked beautiful; the customer (who’d dropped in to look) admired it; I moved on to the inside back. Within ten minutes I realised the inside back panel needed to tuck under the seat panel along the back rail, and the seat panel I’d already fitted was permanently in the way.
I had to lift the seat fabric, fit the inside back lining, fit the inside back, then re-fit the seat. The customer watched the whole performance, by which point I was scarlet. I charged for the original seat-fit only and absorbed the second one. The episode is the reason I now keep a printed checklist of the panel order in the workshop, next to the bench. It hasn’t been needed in twenty years; it’s still there.
The word calico comes from Calicut — now Kozhikode — a port on the Malabar Coast of India where European traders first encountered the simple woven cotton cloth in the 16th century. Portuguese merchants brought it to Europe via Lisbon; the name attached to the fabric and stuck.
By the late 17th century calico was being woven in England as well as imported, and by the 18th century it was the standard inexpensive cotton cloth of the British textile trade. Its use as an upholstery under-cover dates from roughly the same period — mid-18th-century chairs are the earliest where you regularly find an unbleached calico under the show fabric.
- Skipping calico. The calico is the dress rehearsal. Without it, the show fabric is a one-shot job and any mistake is permanent. £6 a metre buys you the right to make mistakes.
- Wrong panel order. Inside-out, every time. Outside back is always last.
- Soft pleats. A box pleat with a rounded fold instead of a sharp crease looks amateurish. Crisp the creases with your thumbnail or a polishing tool.
- Mixed pile direction. Velvet panels with the pile running different ways look two-toned in raking light, permanently. Mark every panel with an arrow as you cut.
- Tack pattern visible through fabric. On thin show fabrics, regularly-spaced tacks underneath show as a faint ripple on top. Use fine tacks (6 mm) and space them irregularly under any fabric thinner than 250 g/m².
Cover on, panels in the right order, corners pleated. The chair looks like a chair. The next two chapters cover the decorative work that turns it into this particular chair: buttoning and tufting, then the trims and finishings — gimp, welt, decorative nails — that distinguish a Chesterfield from a wing-back from a Knole settee.
Rather hand this one to a professional? Find a good upholsterer near you →