Off Yer Rocker....

Since I have deemed this "Chair Week" here is another chair post....

Today's chair is courtesy of our neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Baker.

One day on our way home I noticed this chair sitting on the curb in front of our neighbors house. It looked like it was in good condition, so I sent the Hubbs and our oldest down to ask Mr. Baker if they were getting rid of it. Sure enough, they were :) The chair looked a little "off" and I soon found out why. The Bakers said that it used to be a rocking chair, they got to the point where they didn't need the "rockers" so they removed them. Leaving a short chair with a tall back. Even though it looked off, I decided I could figure out something to make it look more normal.

I decided to buy 4 decorative fence post toppers to screw into the legs of the chair. They would give it height and some "bulk".

I chose to put an ivory as the 1st coat of paint and my new favorite color, Hosta Leaf (I used it on this project as well). I also chose a matte polyurethane spray to seal it all in.

To begin we had to sand all of the poly (the shiny parts) off of the chair so that the spray paint adheres well. I used the whole can of the ivory as the first coat and then used two cans of the Hosta Leaf . After the paint had dried I sanded down some edges, corners, etc... to give it the worn in look. After sanding I applied about 3 coats of the Matte Polyurethane spray.

And this is the finished product......

I love how this chair turned out, the color kind of makes it for me.

Thanks for stopping by!

One man's trash.....equals new chairs for me!

This week I have deemed "Chair" week! The next couple days I will share a few chairs that I have recently finished. This post has been a few months in the making...

In december after picking our son up from a friends house we saw these chairs on the side of the road...

...and because I have no shame when it comes to these types of things, I picked them up!

Our current table is a beautiful old table that has been in my brother-in-laws family for many years. They gave it to us and we fixed it up and re-upolstered the chairs that came with it. We love this table, but it only has 4 chairs and when guests come over we have to pull out the ugly card table chairs. Not so inviting! After seeing these two chairs on the side of the road I decided they were going to be our *new* guest chairs.

First things first...reupolster! I found a fabric I loved that was on sale for $6 a yard and got foam 50% off(I love me some deals!). We have our staple gun to staple the fabric in place, pliers to pull the staples out of the old cushion, and a serated knife to cut the foam.

We realized there were TWO layers of upolstery to remove and A LOT of staples! We also discovered that these chairs were so old the they were stuffed with actual cotton, not foam. We ended up needing to cut  new seats to upolster to because the original ones were cracking.

Next I sanded the chairs down to remove the original finish. We had to completely rebuild one of the chairs with screws, wood glue, etc...because it was falling apart. I chose a dark tan to paint them because I didn't want a dark brown (It would look fake next to our dark brown stained chairs). The outcome?

Steril. Something that looked like it belonged in my doctor's office. Blah.....

So, I tried a technique of rubbing a dark stain into the deep wood grains of the wood (On top of the paint we already had on them) to give them a darker color and "texture".

The result? GREAT! But, it didn't "fit" in our house....

Sooooo back to the drawing board again.

Step 5,301) Sand down again!

The next color I decided to try was a dark hunter green.

The result? Too blue.....

SOOOOO I tried the stain technique again, but this time on top of the hunter green.

The result?! Well, they are less blue at least..."They are fine, I'm tired of redoing these chairs, so I'm just going to say uncle and decided to "love" the color and go with it."

We screwed the seats into place and they were finished!

I am SO glad they are done AND now we won't need to pull out card table chairs when we have guests :)

  

Check back tomorrow to see the "Off yer' rocker" project!

Meet, Stickers......

Meet Stickers, our new family dog. Yes, dog. Even though it looks like a rat, it is, in fact, a dog.

Since I've been sewing pillows a lot lately I have had bags of pillow batting laying around the house. The bags have pictures of all kinds of stuffed animals on them. My son saw them and decided that I needed to make one. My thoughts? "Umm, Seriously? A stuffed animal? No, thanks..." And of course with his amazingly accurate memory he did not forget about it. So, because I love my child, I attempted to figure out how to make a stuffed puppy(his choice).

Thanks to some tutorials online this is what I came up with....

Puppy Patterns I made...

My son decorated this one :)  

I used scraps of fabric from my oldest's baby bedding. We did red gingham for the main part of the puppy and a "fuzzy" ivory for the belly and ears.

It took a little figuring out, but the puppy did in fact get finished.

We added buttons and ribbon for a collar.

In my opinion it's kinda ugly, but my son loves it, so that makes it totally worth it...even a little cuter :)

The things we do for our kids......