Upholstery yardage chart

What the trade charts say

Every upholstery supplier has a yardage chart, and they all look authoritative: a grid of little line drawings with a number under each. They are genuinely useful, and it is worth knowing exactly what kind of thing they are before you order 18 yards of anything on the strength of one.

These are the figures from two published charts, both for 54-inch cloth, which is what almost all upholstery fabric sold in the United States is.

The two charts disagree by 80% on the same sofa

Look at the sofas. One chart says a six-foot sofa takes 10 yards, rising to 11 at seven feet and 13 at nine. The other says a three-cushion sofa takes 18. Those are the same piece of furniture in most people's houses, and the difference is most of a bolt.

Neither chart is wrong. Both carry nearly the same small print — Add for arm covers, self-lined skirts and attached pillow backs. A matching allowance is included; large repeats may take more. — and that sentence is the explanation. A single number has to stand for a whole piece of furniture, and the same sofa can have a skirt or not, arm covers or not, attached pillow backs or not, a pattern that needs matching or not, and a deep roll arm or a slim one. Every chart bundles some of those and states none of them. Two charts bundling differently give different numbers, and both are honest about their own sofa.

This is the thing to take from a yardage chart: it is a starting figure for a style of furniture the chart's author had in mind, not a measurement of yours. Used that way it is a good sanity check. Used as an order quantity it is a coin toss with an 80% spread.

What a piece list gives instead

The alternative is to stop treating a sofa as a single number. A piece of furniture is a list of named rectangles — an inside back, an outside back, a seat deck, two inside arms, two outside arms, two arm facings, and two faces and a gusset for every cushion — and the fabric it takes is whatever those rectangles need once they are packed across the width of your actual roll.

That is what the upholstery calculator does. These are its figures for the same furniture, on the same 54-inch cloth, plain, with the 10% cutting margin the trade adds:

The armchair at 5.5 yards sits in the middle of the published range for a club chair, which runs from about 2½ yards for a small slipper chair to 7 for a deep wing chair. The three-seater at 12.5 yards sits between the two charts — above the 10 quoted for a six-foot sofa, well below the 18. That is the honest position for a plain cloth with no skirt and no arm covers.

Why the same sofa takes more on a European roll

Every figure above assumes 54-inch cloth, about 137 cm. Much of the fabric sold in Britain and Europe comes on a 140 cm roll, which is barely different, but plenty comes on 130 or 120 — and the difference is not proportional, because pieces do not shrink to fit. A 130 cm inside back will lie two-across on a 280 cm roll, one-across on 140, and one-across on 130 as well, wasting a strip the whole length of the piece.

That is the second thing a chart cannot do for you. It assumes a width, usually without saying so, and the moment your roll is narrower the answer moves by a whole piece rather than by a percentage. A cutting plan shows you which pieces share a row, so you can see the waste rather than pay for it unknowingly.

Pattern repeats are where charts stop helping

None of the published charts gives a figure for a pattern repeat, and the reason is that there is not one to give. Every piece has to start at the same point in the design, so each is rounded up to a whole repeat: a 64 cm repeat on a piece that needs 70 cm of length costs 128 cm, and the waste depends on how each piece's length falls against the repeat rather than on any percentage you could add to a total.

The charts handle this by including "a reasonable allowance for matching" and warning that large repeats may take more. That is as far as a single number can go. The calculator rounds each piece to the repeat individually and shows the result in the cutting plan, which is why its patterned figures can be a long way above its plain ones.

How to use both

Take the chart figure as a sanity check on the order of magnitude, and the piece list as the quantity. If the two are far apart, the gap is telling you something specific: usually that your furniture has features the chart bundled and your piece list does not, or the other way round.

• Add for a skirt. A self-lined skirt on a three-seater is several yards on its own and every chart says to add for it separately.
• Add for arm covers and attached pillow backs. Both charts name these as excluded.
• Add for piping. Cut in strips across the roll, it consumes width rather than length, which is why it is easy to forget and awkward to estimate.
• Measure the widest piece before anything else. If it will not fit across your roll, no amount of extra length fixes it — that piece has to be cut in two and seamed, or the cloth has to be wider.

And the figures on this page are for typical furniture rather than yours. The dimensions behind them are ordinary ones for each type, checked to sit inside the range the published charts quote but not measured off any particular chair. Measure your own frame, put the numbers into the calculator, and the estimate stops being an estimate.