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Thursday, May 24

rocking chair rescue #2

My very first furniture project was a rocking chair with no seat that I dragged from the curb to my mint green rental house in Somerville, Mass, so I have a bit of a soft spot for rockers.  Sorry there's no "before" shot.  I didn't realize at the time that I was going to blog about projects.  Wait, blog wasn't even a word back then...  Here's the chair in its current state, after its second renovation.  

close-up of the nice shaker tape job 
(joint project with the husband)


Fast forward to a beautiful fall day last year, en route to Quonquont Farm to pick apples.  We passed a tag sale, and as is its wont, my car pulled off the road and shut off its engine.  Despite (or perhaps because of) the decrepit shape of the rocker, I had to have it.  
check out those awesome bright yellow thumbtacks
holding the seat down

olive green is the kindest way to 
describe the seat color

when I got up from my first rock in the chair,
my back was covered in flaking white paint

My first thought (not surprising to those who know me, or even just you blog readers) was to scrape and paint blue.  But then I started scraping and sanding, and some beautiful layers of gray, blue and green paint were revealed.  So instead I gave it a few layers of exterior poly and set to work on the seat.  I had already chosen one of our fabulous vintage fabrics in a riot of colorful flowers.  I upscaled the upholstery job by using actual furniture tacks instead of thumb tacks.  It was slow and painstaking, but not as hard as I expected.  But don't look TOO closely at the upholstery job, please.  

nice legs

seriously, this was the wallpaper 
in my childhood kitchen


nice staging, huh?
note the United Farmers box and the 
beautiful pansies

more staging - white chair from local junk shop
and wooden industrial chair $1 at a tag sale







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