Two of a Kind

Yay! Matching desk chairs for me and the hubs. I'm unreasonably thrilled with my doings.

Photo Shoot

So... guess what? Craft Magazine is going to feature the reupholstered rocking chair I made in its last page column called "Makeover"! I know! When they emailed I was totally flabbergasted and may well have overgushed about, you know, all the love in emails back.

First they compiled a knowingly insightful series of interview questions, and then yesterday they sent out Dustin, a friendly neighborhood photographer, to take some pictures of the rocker - and, of course, of Lara riding it.



Getting the model to pose for longer than 15 minutes involved some cajoling as you may well imagine, and someone - not mentioning any names - may have gotten an extra piece of "vitamin candy" for cooperating past the point of her innate interest.



But overall, Lara was a fan of the "photofographer," and I think I might have even ended up in a few pics as well. Should be in the next issue.

Oh, and incidentally, check out this cool light-diffuser thingie that was part of the very cool, very elaborate photography equipment setup:



I feel like it could be a cool ring or necklace.

Apartment Overhaul, part II

Ta-da! My office chair has officially been beautified. I totally love it. The whole process of reupholstering took about two hours, and was pretty straightforward. I used a very heavy canvas fabric from the As-Is IKEA bin (it was originally meant to be a curtain), so I think it will stand some level of wear fairly well. To figure out what to do, I just googled "how to reupholster office chair" and checked out some of the many tutorials out there. I did hit my finger with my hammer by accident (for the first time in my life!) and, let me tell you - ouch.

Apartment Overhaul, part I

I don't know if you've ever had a moment like this, but I looked around our apartment about a week ago and suddenly hated everything. Just wanted to throw everything out and start all over... which of course will never happen for various economic and ecological reasons. But at least some changes were in order. So:

1. good-bye to the horrid old plastic/aluminum folding chairs we were using as dining chairs (thanks, Freecycle!), and hello to these new lovelies in black from IKEA.

2. Similarly, good-bye to the giant unwieldy pink high chair of doom, and hello this small vintag-y one, also from IKEA.

3. Also, good-bye to this fairly useless and apparently unwelcoming plastic table (I say unwelcoming because Lara never ever wanted to use it for anything!), and hello to a more adult IKEA model which I have since modified in a pretty cool way. More on that in a later post.

At the same time that I ran wild in the IKEA warehouse, I also decided to try to reupholster a few things. I found a bunch of cool fabric in the IKEA As-Is department, and have transformed Lara's outgrown ride-on toy. It was one of those faux-velvet plush snail ones (see picture inset), and when I cut off the fabric, I discovered that it had pretty cool-looking guts:



With some inspiration from this ride-on toy, I made this:



Looks pretty cool if I do say so myself. This was a pretty finicky project, I have to admit - because of the way that the seat and rocking bottom are attached, I basically had to hand-sew the fabric directly onto the thing.

More redoings coming up!