I see stars while Unwrap Material - Chair - Help

The chair seems to be too complicated to unwrap at a go and thus I create seam 1 by 1 for the partial object. I select the panels for the chair as the image. I create seam, unwrap and rotate so to have horizontal wood lines (right image). However when I render, the texture for the render still remain where the wood lines looks vertical.

My questions :
a) Have I missed out any steps to activate the unwrap? so that the panel will render according to my edition?

b) There seems to be too many edges, vertices, faces for the chair. I have difficulty to cut seam as the wire view looks messy. I see stars all the times and select the wrong edges. Anyone has any good way to select edges/faces to cut seam or assign texture?

opss…missed out the images. please refer to below



Go materials -> Textures -> Mapping then change to UV. The render looks fine with mapping on Global (or generated…) because of the very nature of that type of mapping, and the way it stretchs. It appears to be the correct image, while in reality it is simply a row of pixels stretched into oblivion.

Hope that helped.

PS: That mesh is actually quite clean, although a bad shape for selecting verts. Because of the way that loops work in Blender those gaps are stopping you from going Alt+RMB. The model is quite nice btw.

Finally manage to get my first object textured. Wefyb, thank you very much for your help and encouragement.