The Tale of a Chair

I stalk furniture-makeover blogs. I admit it. I'm a stalker. There's nothing I like better than a good before-and-after post. So I'm making my own contribution to the genre here with this little gentlewoman in distressed circumstances.

Her story is a sad one, but it has a happy ending, as you can see.

Unfortunately I don't have any of the before-before pictures, as I bought the chair sometime while we were in California at a flea-market and I wasn't planning on blogging about it. Originally it was actually three chairs - well, parts of three chairs. One was nearly complete, one was about half a chair, and the rest were various bits and pieces from at least one other. I bought it for, I think, $5 (it may have been $5 per chair, but as I said it was a while ago). I left it with my parents, since they had a lot more storage on the farm than we had in our apartment, until not long before we had to pack up to move back to England. One weekend while I was visiting I got all the bits out and Dad helped me make one solid chair out of the wreckage. We salvaged the best pieces and I seem to remember that the seat and one arm/leg combo went together, we took the other arm/leg from the second chair and the back was one of the loose bits from the "third" chair that came with it. I really wish I'd taken pictures of it all the way I found it. We had to do a lot of drilling, hammering and gluing but I finally had a chair. Sort of.
 
When I bought it I had in mind that it could be a chair to take to SCA events but it's solid wood, and not a light-weight. It also needed a lot of cosmetic work as it was pretty bashed about, and ripped black vinyl is so not me.

 

The first thing I did was unscrew and pry off the padding from the back and seat. What was left wasn't pretty. Glue and grunge.

I filled a few holes and then sanded the wood just enough to knock off the remnants of glue and to take down the shine.

Then I gave it two coats of chalk paint made from Plaster of Paris and a $2 quart of oops paint I got from Home Depot. It wasn't the best to make chalk paint out of as it was a paint/primer combo enamel rather than a flat paint, but it was $2 so I went with it.

I only distressed it a little as David hasn't got his head round the whole "shabby chic" thing yet. I sanded it in places where it would look natural so it's fairly subtle. I finished it off with a coat of Minwax Finishing Wax and buffed it up.

I have been wanting to try upholstering with painters' drop cloth, as everyone in DIY-blogland has been doing. I also wanted script fabric, but not in French, which is the rage, because I don't speak French and, beautiful as it is, I wanted something that means something to me. So I found a font I like (based on Jane Austen's handwriting no less) and printed out a large "Rest" for the back. I traced the word onto freezer paper and then cut it out as a stencil.

I wanted it to look like old ink on parchment so I used chocolate brown fabric paint and dabbed it over the stencil.

For the seat I found a number of quotes I liked about rest and relaxation, typed them up in the Jane Austen font, and then printed them out onto four sheets of paper, which made it just about the right size to cover the seat cushion.  To get the words onto the fabric I printed them backwards and then used the Citrasolv transfer method. I started at the top and by the time I got to the bottom I was pretty tired of rubbing that spoon over the paper so the ink didn't transfer very well there. I then went over the transferred letters with a fine paintbrush and the brown fabric paint so it would match the back.

I'd ripped the vinyl off the seat and the plaque that screws into the back so I stapled the dropcloth over the existing foam and screwed the back and seat on.

 And here she is in all her impoverished-gentry glory.

Everything you see in this photo, with the exception of the lampshade and the alabaster bowl, was bought from a thrift store/flea-market/charity shop/car-boot sale or was a gift. (The bowl was bought at the Khan el-Khalili in Cairo and is a souvenir of our trip to Egypt last year).

I still have to make piping to go around the seat and the back plaque but my sewing machine is somewhere in all of this -

and I needed the seating when we had guests over so it will have to wait until I can get the dumping ground my workroom organized. Sigh.

PS - on the plus side, I recently found this desk for $10, which also needs an overhaul, to use as a sewing table (if I can ever get to it).

Wendy


Sharing at Kathe with an E, No Minimalist Here, AttaGirlSays, Not Just a Housewife, Savvy Southern Style, Knick of Time, Redoux, Jennifer Rizzo, Miss Mustard Seed, Funky Junk Interiors, Pretty Handy Girl

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