Monday, July 29, 2013

Overwhelmed

Silence on my blog has not at all meant no projects have been going on. Quite the opposite, actually. I'm a little overwhelmed trying to write about massive projects I have done in the past several months, so I am going to start very small. 
I was recently in the market for a new chair for the desk in my bedroom. I would have loved a Jonathan Adler Chippendale chair--or any Chippendale chair really, but something new was just not in the budget.
I headed to the local Habitat for Humanity ReStore--they were having a Grand Re-Opening Celebration!! which included 15% off everything. I thought I may have some luck finding a unique chair there, and I was right.

I got this bamboo arm chair for a song- it was marked $10 but as I said before everything was 15% off. So I paid about $8.50 for it plus tax. It has a little damage in the form of discoloration on the back of the chair, but I think it just gives it some character.
The next step was to find some fabric for recovering the seat, and decide what to do with the frame.
For the frame, I thought I had a couple options- 1) paint the frame a bright, fun color, or 2)clean it up and maybe apply some polyurethane but keep it natural.

In the end, I decided to leave the frame natural, although I did give it a thorough cleaning and a coat of clear poly. It still has some color variation but at least now its all shiny!

I originally had bought a purple/grey patterned fabric from Joann's for this chair. I laid it out on the chair and let it hang out that way for a couple days, and then decided this just wasn't the fabric for the project.
I made a trip back to Joanns, and found this awesome fabric called "Hazel" in navy, from KAS/Richloom. 
Getting the seat off the frame took some work. The two screws in the front were easily removed, but the screw holding it on in the back was striped, and it seemed at one point the hole had been filed with woody putty or something, so that now the hole was smaller than the head of the screw. It took a couple hours and a lot of patience to get the screw out finally!
I won't go into details about recovering the seat, but it involved a staple gun and some patience to get things just right without wrinkles. I think all my hard work turned out well-- see below!


Eventually I will get to the point of showing you the desk set up in my bedroom. Until then, this is the chair in my living room. At this point I haven't recovered the back cushion. For one, its a more involved project including my sewing machine and some cover buttons. But also, I don't think its necessary for making the chair comfortable and usable. 
What do you think? Should I recover the back cushion? 


Sunday, July 14, 2013

Changing Directions

Hello. It's only been about 8 months since I last posted! I intend to start posting more regularly starting now, however I'm going to take a slightly different direction with the blog now. I started this blog purely as a way to share my projects with my family and friends that lived far away, and then started adding in some sewing. Sewing sort of took over...and then nothing.
So I'd like to start writing more of a "lifestyle" blog. Naw, I'm not going to tell you how to live. I'm just using that term to mean I'm going to write about whatever pleases me that day. It will probably center around decorating/DIY house stuff, sewing, personal finance and organizing/housekeeping. Why? Because sometimes I have thoughts about these things. 
So yea, keep on the lookout for a post from me soon. 

Allison