Of Foam and Curtains

I thought you might all like to see/read about a few changes that I have been making to various things around the apartment. First of all our living room has been rearranged again... I think this makes it the 4th time, but you didn't know about all of them since they were mostly done before I ever took pictures to share with you. I think it will now remain the way it is for a little while, at least until Christmas when we have to make room for a tree that is :) Curtiss thinks that I am nutty for actually liking to do these kinds of changes.

The next change is actually a piece of furniture that my in-laws gave us.
a few years ago they were at a garage sale and they bought a chair and dubbed it...

THE HIPPIE CHAIR

Now this chair is quite unique and we think you would have to go a long way before you would find another like it. It sits quite low to the ground and the shape of it is not a common one.
But we needed furniture and since the chair had been sitting in the garage unused for quite some time we were given the option of taking it and fixing it up.

The biggest problem was that it had no cushions and since it had a spring bottom it was quite uncomfortable to sit in besides the fact that it meant that you were even lower to the ground.
So I thought "no big deal, we'll buy some foam and some nice fabric and I'll make some"
So sure enough I got the measurements and after a call to my ever faithful sister, Trina, I had the information I needed for a trip to Joanns.

I never before knew how expensive foam is, I think my jaw just about hit the ground
when I saw the sign that said 4" foam $56.99 a yard.
I quickly decided that I didn't like the chair that much, it would've cost us about $100.00
to fix the chair up. So we figured that the chair would just have to
go back to the garage where it came from.

This is where my mother in law comes in.
It seems that there were some ugly porch cushions that belonged to Curtiss's grandmother and she was just going to get rid of them so Mom asked me if I wanted to take them and see if I could use the filling to make some cushions out of. She also had some curtains that had been hanging in the living/dining room of the house in St- and she was replacing them so she wondered if I wanted the material. So I figured "nothing ventured nothing gained" and set to work...

The first thing that I did was take the foam
(it was actually more like think batting that had been layered)
out of the plastic like fabric.



(you can see the chair in the background there)

My next step was to take the curtains and remove all the meddle hooks and pleats that were all along the top, and wash them. To tell the truth I felt kinda like Maria Von Trapp when she is making clothes for the Von Trapp children. I still have lots of fabric left so if any of you want a dress or something let me know :)

I don't have any pictures of the next few steps but suffice it to say I pieced the foam together so that it would be the right size to fit in the chair and then I layed them on the fabic and cut them to size. I didn't have any zippers or elastic to finish off the back of the covers so I made them with a flap that folds over the end.
And here you can see the finished product.

The next thing that had to be done with the chair was to stain and refinish the wood. What had been on there years ago was completely worn off so I took an old sock and some varnish and went to work.

Personally I think it looks like a completely new chair
and instead of $100.00 we spent about $5.00.
(and yes, I did get the stripes to line up just about perfect on the two cushions :)

I also spray painted a floor lamp that Curtiss's grandmother gave also,
it was one of those pieces that has been around since the time when everyone thought you should paint all the furniture gold and some thing..
most things that I have seen are green with gold but this lamp was off white and gold, well to make a long story short it is now a nice black and it is vastly improved :)