More Chairs

While I'm on a roll (and putting off income taxes), I took stock of our family situation. Many of our grandkids are moving into and through the teen years and we have grafted 2 members in via marriage. So when we have family functions, we need more chairs.
As long as I can remember, our mom and dad had these 2 straight chairs. I'm thinking at least one of them occupied the bedroom I shared with Uncle Joe and his wintergreen liniment until we built onto the house which included separate upstairs bedrooms for my sister and I. Seems in addition to the chair(s) and our bunk beds, I had a dresser and Joe had this fantastic huge dresser (that of course wreaked of wintergreen) Oh, did I mention that wintergreen is one of the few flavors I don't care for? That dresser sold in the auction. Hopefully a relative got it. I really don't know. It really was a gorgeous piece of furniture. Back to the chairs. We did get these 2 chairs at the time of the auction. Dad set up an interesting clause in his will. Anything that either my sister or I wanted, we could have, with the idea that we should work out some kind of equality. Anything that both of us wanted, would be put in the auction and we would then each have the opportunity to buy it, leaving the other person with the "profit" from it. I thought that was pretty equitable. However, I think we worked things out so well that we didn't need to take it to the degree of the auction. So anyway, we got these chairs. The cane seats had rotted out, probably back when mom and dad got them, so they put these fabricated seats on them. The seats were actually made of fiber, but looked like leather. They are still available. Here is a site from Rockler to show you a new one. A picture of the old one will come later. http://www.rockler.com/fiber-seat   I have some sort of memory of when those seats were put on the chairs, but that could be conjured rather than reality now which is probably 60 years later. We used them in our East Main Street house for some gatherings, but when we moved to this more "modern" house they didn't seem to fit. Georgia and some of the girls were into "Shabby Chic", so after I removed the fabric seats and recaned them, we set out to modernize them by painting them. That project never really got finished. So while I was in the "restoration" mode, I went ahead and stripped them and refinished them. So here they are, ready for a family Easter gathering. Oh, I also got Georgia's grandpa's rocker out and dusted it off in case anyone needs to rock that precious new great grandson.

The 2 reclaimed chairs

One of the chairs so you can get a better look.

Fabric seat removed before recaning. Yes, somehow, I still had it.

And another!!!

I think this finally finishes off the projects from our Crafting Camp (See my most recent post.)
Another project we worked on that weekend was to take steps to restore a chair that had been "on the shelf" for a long time. In the 50's there was a "fad" called "antiquing" which was probably a forerunner of shabby chic. You can go look it up if you're interested. The game was to take a nice piece of furniture you were tired of looking at and through a process of several layers of paint, create a "faux" finish that might resemble a wood grain to some, but in some other color. This chair was antiqued in blue tones by Georgia's mom. Sometime, maybe 20 years ago she didn't have room for the chair so it came to our house. It needed some repair and didn't really fit our country decor at the time so it went to the basement in our house on Main Street; Urbana where it was victim to a couple of basement floods. That cause some of the parts to disappear. So in our Crafting Camp, we made some of those parts and the chair went back to the basement (this basement is dry) until this past week.

We are needing a chair in our bedroom. Our bedroom furniture is cherry. So I did my best to match the cherry color and I picked out a couple of seat fabrics for Georgia to choose from. I think we came up with a very elegant and nice looking chair, restoring the chair's dignity and making a nice seat in our bedroom. You'll have to go back to the Crafting Camp post to see some  "before" pictures.