Emily
No seriously, don't try this.  It was a royal pain.  It haunted me in my dreams.

Waaaaaaay back in June, I went to a garage sale and the lady tried to give me chairs.  No seriously, she had like 15 chairs at this sale and she offered me at least 3 of them.  For free.  They were ugly.  Really ugly.  I painted and recovered one of them that was sort of a dining chair and sold it at our garage sale.  And then this guy sat in my basement for over a month because I was too chicken to tackle it.


Dun-dun DUN!  The evil yellow 70's chair that nearly did me in.


Check out the gnarly nailhead trim.  There was a time when I thought that I might just let it live in my my music room.  The yellow kind of matches.  And then I decided that July 12th was the day.  That's right, it took us 14 days of blood sweat and tears to turn it to this:


Ta-da!  It's kind of like our baby.  We fought so hard to get this baby into the 21st century, oy.  I scraped my hands pulling staples, made my knees raw from kneeling on the carpet, and nearly bruised my hand from the stupid staple gun.  Yeah, I'm kind of a wimp.  It's ok.


Imagine trumpets sounding and bells ringing as we finally put the last staple in.  Anyway, the fabric is kind of a cross between velvet and chenille and I got it for cheap cheap at Mill End Textiles.  Nevermind that I bought 4 yards and used like, 2.  ;)  I bought the piping fabric and piping there too.  This was, btw, my first time doing piping too.

I had help.  On that fateful day, July 12th, I found this awesome website/tutorial that was very helpful and encouraging and made everything look so easy.  If you're doing some easy chairs, check out this link.  I think I'll go the easy route next time.  ;)  Oh, and Ted helped too.  Actually he helped quite a lot.  A LOT lot.

The button, however, was my own addition.  I found a button-making kit at Michael's on sale for $1.50. It was exactly the right size and I didn't need a fancy button-covering contraption to make it.  I love it!  I think the button totally brings an element of class to the chair.  I had to drill holes in the back of the chair to make it happen.  Yeah.  Just more blood, sweat, and tears.


Notice that we chose NOT to put the nailhead trim back in.  Instead we used piping around the arms.  In retrospect, I totally should have just bought more nailhead trim.  It would have made life much easier, but I like the way this turned out.


Oh, and super bonus?  Nori loves the black fuzzy fabric.  She can play jungle hunter camouflage cat 24/7.  She's already claimed the chair as her own.
2 Responses
  1. Courtney Says:

    Fantastic job Emily! It's totally transformed and looks beautiful.


  2. Mikalah Says:

    I LOVE what you did with this! Isn't reupholstery scary??? I've been wanting to find a chair exactly like that for ages! I really do need to go garage saling/thrifting with you. =)


Post a Comment

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...