Have a Seat....

Well, before school was out last year, a fellow teacher asked me if I would recover some dining room chairs for her. Knowing that chairs are very simple, I said yes. Well I was in for a surprise. I'd never seen dining room chairs put together like this. My teacher friend told me that they were hand made and had been in her family for years.

Notice that instead of just having a padded board for the bottom these have frames and springs. They were really worn and somebody had stuffed some plastic bags under the springs just to keep the springs from popping through.

Have any of you ever seen chairs assembled like this?

So anyway, to make this work I had to take this apart, there were too many springs that were broken. Then I used webbing on the bottom of each chair. Then a layer of muslin, then foam, then more muslin, then batting, finally the decorative fabric that the customer had selected.

I'm pleased with the way the chairs turned out, and I hope my customer is too. Oh, I normally don't do custom work, I usually just do the work that pleases me and put it in my booth hoping that a customer will like it and take it home. But, being a teacher, and I had this summer pretty free, I decided to take a few custom jobs. I'm finishing up the last one now. Yes, there is one more after these chairs.

Here's the before.

Here's the after; a total of 4 chairs.

Auction Day

One of my favorite pass-times is to go to auctions. I've been going to auctions for YEARS; long before I started upcycling furniture for resale. But this is one of the ways that I pick up furniture to upcycle for my booth.

So yesterday morning, I set out for a farm auction in a neighboring town. The weather was beautiful for a July day in Kansas. The morning was cloudy, which was actually good because it kept the temperatures cool. The setting for the auction was quite lovely. Like I said, this was on a farm. So there were lots of open land, an older house surrounded with large trees, and many barns. In the afternoon the clouds disappeared and the sun came out so those big trees provided lots of shade and there was a cool breeze that kept the day very pleasant.

There was all kinds of primitive farm stuff for sale.... much of it, I couldn't even tell you what it was used for. No, I didn't buy any items that I couldn't identify.

There has been quite a few Amish families moving to areas close by in recent years. They too like auctions. So there were lots of Amish people there. I really enjoyed seeing all their buggies pulled by horses parked amongst the trucks.

I know the Amish don't want their pictures to be taken, but I was SO tempted. It was such fun to see the boys and men in their straw hats and the women and girls in their stiff bonnets and dresses. At one point the little girls were all playing behind a red barn on the farm, it was truly a Kodak moment but I respected their beliefs and didn't snap a picture.

Most of the items had been pulled out of the barns for sale so I bought some wooden boxes, old doorknobs, tools, and some VERY DIRTY furniture. I've never purchased furniture before that I actually had to clean off and strip the fabric off of prior to storing in my basement. But this I did. Just look at that dirt!!! Yuck!

I bought a shabby little cabinet with the veneer peeling and a sewing cabinet that I really didn't want... but I couldn't resist since both pieces were sold as a unit for fifty cents. Yep, you got that right, 50 CENTS. I'm going to try to upcycle them, and if they don't turn out I'm certainly not out much money. No pictures of those right now. I'll save it for another post as I do have some ideas of what to do with them.

I'm always misplacing my screwdrivers as I'm working on my projects, they had boxes of them at the sale. So I was able to buy one box of screwdrivers. Some look to be very old, and we all know how I love old (vintage). :)

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Yes, that big knife thing came in the box of screwdriver. Maybe it will be handy at some point.

Now that I have about an extra 50 screwdrivers I may be able to find one when I need it!

Overall it was a great day for an auction. I'm looking forward to working on some of my new projects. I'm counting down the days until I can move into the new booth space.

Junk Lovers Trip to Canton TX

All junkers love a good flea market! Lucky me, I have several junk loving friends... and of course I'm a junk lover myself! So, after talking about a girls trip to Canton, Texas for the First Monday sale, we finally made it a reality. Boy did we have fun!!! Unfortunately we chose a day that the temperature was 102 but we made the best of it.

The trade days is HUGE! We spent from morning to night seeing as much as we could but I know we still missed parts of it.

Here's a picture of me sifting through some junk. This lady had great bits and pieces.

Treasures everywhere you look!

The following day we headed a little farther north to McKinney, TX to enjoy their charming historic downtown.

It was a very fun trip with some long-time friends. Aren't those the best??? We're already planning our next trip together.