Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Broken Down Butterfly Chair: Time to Remodel

It's not enough for me to just have a ratty old chair.  No, I have to do something with it.  Whenever something is plain, even if I love it at first, I'll eventually do something to revive it.  I've had this chair for YEARS!  I believe it was a birthday or Christmas gift at one time, but over the years the black canvas type fabric has dulled, and eventually ripped on one of the sides.  Something I learned from my mom is when something like a chair looks broken or ready to throw away, it just means the fun starts.  Time to remodel it.  This fabric was left over from the two bolts I bought to make curtains to hide my storage room.  I have this crazy fascination with pink camouflage.  Not to mention, I love fluffy malibu style feathers!  Ten years ago, if you told me I'd be making a bright pink chair and loving it, I'd have thought you were nuts, but anyway, I loved this snuggle flannel (yes that's really what it's called) fabric, so soft, but not too fluffy that it doesn't breathe like the anti-pill fleece, for example.  I started with only the intention of covering it with the fabric, but as I started pinning the fabric in the odd, curved seat hanging on the metal frame, I realized something was missing.  When I went to JoAnn's after class to perhaps try and figure out what was missing, I'd practically given up, but when I went to check the areas with the boas and feathers, as I always do (as if I don't have enough feathers for my crafting) I found this pink malibu type boa.  What's more, it was buy one get one half off!  Lucky days :)  So I was in luck.  They had four left.  Since I had no idea how it was going to work yet, I grabbed all four and went home, starting to pin it on, completely having to re-pin the edges of the material, though, and cut them to be more appealing.  It was all coming together.  Perhaps super-girlie, but hey, not like that is a first with me!  This project was probably the most painful of the week.  As I hand sew everything, in the two days it took to finish this (when I start, it's hard to stop!) I must have cut my hands on every push pin in the thing!  Finally, after it was done and my clothes were covered in pink strands of fluffy feathers from sewing them together, I had a brand new chair! Not only did it revive it, but I was able to fix the torn side that made it impossible to sit in!  This was, honestly, extremely fun.  I consider all the knicks on my hands signs of hard work and totally worth it. 
The compilation was created in Adobe Photoshop, by the way.  The photos taken with the black material background were cropped, sized, and placed into a new document where the pink boarder was created by using a canvas size for the larger pink, a 20 pixel black boarder around the outside, and two smaller frames cut from a rectangle carefully.  The text was created in two layers on a pink rectangle.  The top layer of text is black with a speckled brush set to a low opacity and strategically set to erase much of the text, leaving only a speckled, faded, faint layer of the words.  Below it is a layer that was not edited much, other than a faint gaussian blur to make the edges less harsh.  All in all, I think the project as a whole was successful (Even if Princess wouldn't get out of the chair for half the photos!  I guess she approves of it, too!).  The most difficult part, though, was admittedly the corners.  They were tricky, especially with two lines of the trim, but as the picture shows, I think they worked out well.

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