The time-honoured skills of upholstery have long since been a masculine domain, with the traditional crafts passed down over the years from master to apprentice. Routes into the industry for a woman embarking on a second career are few and it is only Katy’s sheer determination and genuine love of her craft that have enabled her to achieve what she has to date. With a glowing record behind her and a future specialising in antique restoration ahead, Katy has proven that a bit of grit makes all the difference when breaking into a new industry.

When speaking about her role, Katy’s enthusiasm is clear:

“I love working on all the furniture that comes through the workshop but I get a particular buzz from the older stuff and the antiques. It’s my chance to give it a second life and make it look as good as the day it was first produced. As an upholsterer the challenge is to unravel and convert the designer’s idea and make the piece look beautiful again, and I get a lot of satisfaction from that.”

And yet things could all have turned out very differently, as it was only by accident that Katy discovered her talent for upholstery. Faced with the prospect of finding a new career, with no formal qualifications and no experience other than as a chef, she stuck a pin in a City & Guilds course book and came up with upholstery. After doing some research on the subject, she undertook an access course at York College and was well and truly bitten by the bug.

Several years later and Katy has added a BA Hons in furniture restoration and conservation to her impressive record, as well as the first pure MA degree in upholstery to be awarded in the UK. She also spent time refining her specialised training at the Ecole Boulle, a highly respected Parisian school dedicated to the arts, where her skills have been honed to perfection.

“My life has turned around since I started to learn about upholstery, it’s really become a huge part of my world,” Katy says. “My partner is also a furniture maker and restorer, so our whole house revolves around a love of the craft. I just get such a sense of achievement when I see the finished piece that it makes all the effort it’s taken to get to this place in my career worthwhile.”

The skill, workmanship and passion that a Plumbs craftsman puts into reupholstering your treasured piece of furniture is next to none. Plumbs offers all the benefits of a well established national company, offering furniture repair and reupholstery services, combined with a personal level of service that can only be achieved on a local level.

See The process of re-upholstering an occasional chair:

Transform your living room this Spring with loose covers from Plumbs. With hundreds of fabrics to choose from including cottons, linens, chenilles, easy care stretch fabrics plus luxury velvets, loose covers are ideal if you’re looking for a slightly more informal way to update your furniture.

Offering an alternative solution to replacing a tired sofa or chair, Plumbs loose covers are hand crafted from start to finish and made to measure, which means that they look, fit and feel as good, if not better, than the original upholstery. Plumbs even offer co-ordinating curtains!

From on-trend botanical prints and opulent purples and deep reds to countryside-inspired florals and natural fabrics, Plumbs diverse loose cover collections offer something for everyone.

If your furniture is over ten years old then re-upholstery could be the perfect way to bring a well-loved sofa or chair back to life. Re-upholstery allows you to keep all the original features of your existing furniture, including the shape, comfort and style, but in a brand new fabric.

Plumbs upholstering services range from standard recovering to complete reupholstery including any wooden features, studded work and button backs.

We’ve put together an article explaining a brief history of upholstery. For example, did you know that the term “upholder” is the archaic name for an upholsterer?

Read the article here…

You can also learn about the The Worshipful Company of Upholders, one of the very first Livery Companies of the City of London.

Visit their website here…

Latest government figures say we in the UK send more than half our waste to landfill. That is a huge 62 million tonnes a year in England alone. Now the aim is to reduce landfill by at least 50% over the next 10 years…..

Read More Here…

1. Your furniture is looking tired and worn
2. Your furniture looks as though it never left the 1960’s
3. You have more padding than your furniture
4. Your furniture is cheaper to have re-upholstered than replaced
5. You want to be more creative with your furniture and decor

To read this article in more detail, please click here…

Every year many sofas get thrown into landfills or left on the streets to rot, this is because no-one really knows what can be done; this is where Save Our Sofas come in.

Save Our Sofas gives you advice and ideas of ways to keep your old sofa, giving it a new lease of life, or provide environmentally friendly ways for disposal if it is beyond repair.

Plumbs, along with Save Our Sofas believe every sofa deserves a long life in a good home.

To coincide with the launch of the Save Our Sofas (S.O.S) campaign. Plumbs have sponsored the “Ugliest Sofa in the UK 2009″ competition. All sofas are submitted and voted on by the public, the winning or ugliest sofa will then be re-upholstered for free by Plumbs.

Both the campaign and competition aim to highlight the growing need to consider the environment before throwing household items away, which usually go to landfill. S.O.S tries to educate people about the alternatives of Re-using, Refurbishing or Recycling sofas and other soft furnishings.

Why not help promote the campaign and competition by entering your sofa! You never know, you may get it re-upholstered for free.

Google luck!

It’s not often that you get the chance to use the word ‘unique’ and get away without being accused of exaggeration. But Plumbs of Preston claims the right to be described this way.

Although there are plenty of local and even regional companies in the market, Plumbs is the only manufacturer of fitted furniture covers to offer a nationwide service. Each week about 25km of material is converted into more than 1000 made to measure loose covers for armchairs and sofas.

Started some 45 years ago and still owned by the Plumb family, this Lancashire factory has over 300 staff on the payroll. But this is only part of the story as there are another 150 self employed consultants who deal with customers in their homes. Consultants show customers fabric samples and photographs demonstrating the different fabrics on offer and generally giving advice on the available options. After agreement is reached, the consultant measures up, sends in the details and will ultimately fit the products once complete and shipped.

With over 1000 orders a week to process and at least 200 designs and colourways to contend with, it follows that holding stock of raw material is hardly practical. Instead, Plumbs uses its experience to forecast the likely demand for each fabric and colour alternative which it then passes on to its four major and 16 minor suppliers. It takes around four to six weeks to process an order, from the moment measurements come in from the consultant to the point of delivery. The first stage of the process is to check the measurements and set up the documentation. During this time we expect the material to be delivered from the supplier just in time to go straight onto the Lectra cutter.

In a process still very much dependent on skilled sewing machine operators, of whom the factory employs more than 70 plus a few other machinists installing zips and making-up valances, there is a limit to how much automation is possible. But over the years Plumbs has invested heavily in state-of-the-art automatic cutters from the French manufacturer, Lectra – machines that even ten years ago had a £100,000 price tag. “We have worked closely with Lectra for 15 years,” said production director Arthur Diamond, “and now have seven of their cutters. Because each order is unique, every job has to be cut single ply, but even so our productivity in this area has risen enormously.”

It’s not as simple as saying the Lectra machines have made a four-fold improvement in productivity as savings at the cutter need to be offset with time spent in the firm’s drawing office working on CAD systems to feed the cutters with digital data. But, overall costs and training timescales are down, plus, by using a computer to arrange the numerous pattern pieces on the fabric, maximum material utilisation is being achieved.

One of the biggest problems Plumbs has is appealing to a younger market. When they think of Plumbs loose covers, many people think of the brown knitted stretch fabric on granny’s favourite chair. However, with the continuous development of polyester knitted fabrics, a high quality cover with little stretch is now available with all of the easy-care benefits and they still account for 50 per cent of sales. But nowadays there is much more interest from the market in cotton fabrics which has seen the Traditional Cotton brand grow enormously.

For those customers who want a tighter fit from their covers, but without going all the way to re-upholstery, Plumbs is busy building a network of what it calls ‘technical designers’. So far there are 155 of these independent re-upholstery specialists who receive firm orders, generated in the normal way, but who make the covers to much tighter tolerances. Rather than have the field consultant measure up, details are passed to the technical designer who takes his own measurements.

There is an increasing demand for full re-upholstery which Plumbs now offer as a service throughout the United Kingdom.

Plumbs has a terrific reputation, as a completely dependable, friendly, family run business. An obvious extension to the loose cover range are curtains; not the imported, ready made variety, but rather a top of the range product complete with a full design and fitting service. Currently, curtains such as these account for around twelve per cent of the total sales which includes our internet curtain ordering service.

The life of an order in the Plumbs factory can be seen here 

Out of all your memories you have about your home, I would put money on most of them being while sitting on your sofa or chair. Just think about all those memories you’ve shared with that special someone, what has always been there? Yes, your Sofa!

Now the question is, has your sofa fared the test of time as well as you? Most sofa’s that have shared many fond memories will have seen better days, it’s springs are no longer springy, the fabric is looking worn and cushions that couldn’t cushion a feather.

So, maybe you need to ask yourself, is it time to move on?

Most people in this situation do not know they have other options than just throwing the old one away and buying a new sofa. There are many hassles to buying a new sofa, which you may not have thought of. Firstly, what to do with your old sofa? You can either send it to landfill (think of the environmental issues) or organise some sort of reclamation firm to come and pick it up, usually for a fee. Then there’s the hassle & cost of buying a new sofa that was of similar quality.

Sure you can go and buy a new sofa for under £250 or even a complete suite for under £500 but what sort of craftsmanship and materials do you think go into the production of this type of furniture? Once you start taking out production costs, marketing costs, VAT & delivery that £250 sofa is probably being manufactured for under £50. Now for only £199 you can get your already loved and quality sofa re-covered either in loose covers or by spending a little extra re-upholstered.

Loose Covers still have a pre-conceived bad reputation because in times gone by they all used to be made from a stretchy horrible material and were ill-fitting. This is no longer the case, there are now many different types of high quality fabrics that are bespoke and made to measure to fit any style of furniture.

It’s not just fabric sofas that can be saved from the scrap heap, old Leather furniture can now be revitalised using specially made non slip chenille loose covers to give a full or part leather part fabric high street fashion look.

Why not take a look at the new fabrics and designs you could give to your loved sofa that’s in need of a little TLC.

Take a look at our latest fabrics…