This Chair & That Chair

The very first “dining” chair I ever owned, came from a super-fancy dining set I bought for under $100 at K-Mart over 4 years ago. After accidentally drilling through the table top and losing some screws, I was left with 3 barely upholstered, metal chairs. They were okay. I guess.

And then I got the brilliant idea to give them some sort of face-lift, thus making them my first spray paint project and my first fabric project. Being overwhelmed by fabric stores, I went to Wal-Mart. This was a terrible idea because of their lack of updated, current fabrics, but I’m impatient and ended up buying the ONLY black and white print fabric I could find. And 2 cans of spray paint–matte black & ballet slipper pink. After an hour with the staple gun, spray painting my sidewalk and some screwing & unscrewing, I ended up with these. An improvement based off of what I was working with, but still just okay.

I wasn’t really into the cheapness that the metal chairs were giving off, and the fabric wasn’t looking too hot either. I went to Ikea and bought 4 “stefan” dining chairs for $20 each.

They looked so much better, but I kept using my old, tacky, metal chairs anyway. The new chairs were way too uncomfortable on my butt whenever I sat on them longer than 20 seconds. I took my first brilliant idea and refined it. I ordered fabric, bought high plush batting, and 2″ thick, high-density foam.

When my fabric arrived, it had been printed on unbleached canvas, giving it an oatmeal color instead of the crisp whiteness I was hoping for. I soaked the fabric in a bath of 1 part bleach to 3 parts water for 10-15 minutes and luckily it lightened the negative space to white without affected the color of the print. I removed the chair seat & used spray adhesive to mount the foam onto the top of it, trimmed off the excess (my bread knife worked better than scissors or a box cutter), then stapled 2 layers of batting on top of it. After making sure the fabric print was aligned, I stapled that to the bottom of the chair seat, trimmed off extra fabric, reattached the seat, and now I have this chair (or 4 of them). I think this one is much better than that old one. So does Luke.