Saturday, October 2, 2010

A passion for chairs







My mother says that ever since I was a small child I've had a love for chairs (OK...and shoes). I recall finding child sized chairs, in a variety of stores, carefully selecting my favorite and sitting in it hoping my parents would agree to take it home. Over the years, several of them made it to the check out lane and into the car. My old rocker is now in my adult daughter's possession. I think it is the only one that remained in the family all these decades.



These days my atelier has quite a selection of old chairs waiting for me to love them back to life with paint and wax.





Late this summer my son and his wife (the newly weds) moved to a new place with a dining room. I had helped them resurrect a table left by the roadside last year but, now they needed chairs. The hunt began! I soon found a set of 6 on Craig's List and drove my trusty (rusty?) old Mazda truck to East Springfield and carted them home. The wood was lovely, only needing cleaning and waxing. The seats were another story altogether! I had to discard all of the old horse hair and straw innards. Disgusting doesn't begin to tell the story. I sneezed and itched for days. After hand washing the old tapestry seat covers I deemed them too scratchy to sit on and set them aside for some other project down the road. Accompanied by my trusty pup, Mia, the seatless chairs and I drove the 2 hours to their new home. With the perfect fabric selected, we recovered the seats and immediately put them to good use. They look like they were with the table from the beginning. Great fun; I think they will be in the family for some time!

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