Tackdraft: Upholstery Jobs

Anyone who has cut a 22-inch inside back to 22 inches has done it once and not twice. The frame is not the panel, and the difference is whatever crown your hands put in there. The screen this replaces worked forward from a piece area and a waste figure you typed in, and no amount of arithmetic on those two numbers can know what shape you built. So it asks for something else now. Lay the phone flat on the panel and step it heel to toe from rail to rail, the way you walk a board off with your hands. Each rest takes the lie of that patch off gravity, and the line coming up on screen is the crown you built, not a figure either of us typed in. Off that line: cover travel, the rise and which third of the run it peaks in, the tightest radius and where it sits, any dished stretch with a depth and a place. Name what happens at each end — blind tack, pull to the deck, wrap outside, tacked under the rail, hem, sewn to a neighbor — and the cut length comes back with every allowance shown separately, so you can see where the inches went. On a scroll nose or a bull-nose front you also get the arc swept, the surplus the outer edge carries, and a pleat count with a depth your staples will go through. Put more cotton in and walk the back again: the earlier reading stays on the panel with its own cut length, a tap away, and neither is folded into the other. Setup is one thing, once. Run a tape along your phone in the case you actually work in, long edge and short edge, and hand it those two numbers. They are your step lengths, and they are the last calibration you will do. A few habits worth knowing about. A station will not take until the phone has gone quiet on the cloth, and there is a tick under your thumb when it does, so your eyes can stay on the chair. Lift the phone between stations and that stretch stays a dashed hole until you walk it again. Step further than one footprint and the station is flagged rather than quietly corrected, and where the carry was too slow or too gentle to judge, nothing is claimed about it either way. Hand it your front and back rail heights off a tape and it closes the run against them and tells you what it had to distribute. The shelf of reference photographs that used to ship inside the app has gone with the old screen. They were pictures of other people's chairs, and the chair in front of you is the one being measured. Walks stay put, panel by panel and job by job, with each station's reading and the reason any station was refused. A back you stepped off on Tuesday reads the same on Friday, because the walk is kept whole and the numbers are worked out from it again each time. Nothing gets averaged behind your back either: walk the same chair twice and you have two separate readings to argue with, which is how it should be.