Time to Celebrate

Today is my Birthday, and I picked myself a pretty black and white virtual cake from WildOrchidBaking to match our new furniture piece :)
The last finishing touches were done yesterday evening, even though it is a small piece it took many many days, but the results make me giggle.

But I am jumping to the results, lets start at the beginning...

It all started with these two abandoned ugly ducks. Clearly water damaged, and in general sad state.
Also the structure was wonky. We decided to make of the pretty front feet an ottoman, the back feet have no carvings. So two chairs would become one ottoman.

Pulling them apart turned out to be a challenge. The stuff that came out of the chairs was pretty disgusting, fabric pieces, straw, cotton etc and all in a far from fresh state.

We were left with this. The original idea was to make it square, by using two piece of the original wood connected together (a bit hard to explain). But then we would cut a bit of the carved wood, the parts that are sticking above would be all sawed off. Eventually we thought to just keep the wood as it is, and making the seat rectangular and turning the weird sticking out pieces into arm rests.

I think you are now starting to see where we are going at, still butt-ugly but a cool shape, right :)?
We used the original corners to make it stable, this little chair has so much extra stuff for stability, you could dance on it.

The pieces of wood used for the arm rests are upcycled from an old shelf,

After the added webbing it is starting to look like something.

And after many hours of scraping and sanding the ugly dark varnish you can finally appreciate the carvings, which are much prettier and more dimensional than we first thought.

Then I painted it, which I had shown last week. The painting and varnishing took me a full 3 days.

The color choice of the paint work was because of this beautiful vintage embroidery. It is completely embroidered and has gorgeous colors and texture.

Doesn't make these colors you super cheerful?

For the additional unexpected finishing touch a black and white double piping, which is really frustrating to sew and staple but gives a beautiful finishing.

And here it is (she said proudly), it is fun, colorful, cheerful and 90% made of upcycled/ recycled/ vintage materials, yaaay!

Stripes, flowers, lots of colors what is not to love about this?

I think this would be great as a vanity chair in the bedroom, or in the hallway or in the living room. Could even be used as piano chair, but most of all this is a statement piece and should be seen :)

Can't wait to paint the ugliness out of another chair :)

The chair is available at StarHomeStudio among others one of a kind furniture pieces.

Work in Progress

With all the sad and dark things going on in the world, it is nice to escape to a peaceful and colorful place by creating. I am painting a sweet little piece of furniture which is basically made from scrap but I will show that in another blog post once the piece is entirely ready as the transformation is quite something and I want to show it completely.

Hoping that July will bring happy news around the world, I think we can all use it these days!

Work in Progress

Finally some progress with the two chairs that I have been showing since January!
They are now all cleaned and repaired. And I am now painting them with 6 layers of different colors.

As it is a pretty classic chair we wanted to have it a little crazy and unusual. The 6 layers with sanding in between does take a lot of time and upholstering of course will take a while longer.

But after 4-5 months it really is now time to see the end result as this is crazy :)
The weather now is perfect to spent hours outside to paint, so that is great.