Shabby Chair

Since it's gradua-tion time at our house, it's time for senior pictures. We have a cute friend who is a fabulous photographer, and decided to take Lucy's pictures out at the barns and orchard of Lu's grandpa's house. It turned out to be the perfect setting. You can see more of Andee McDonald's wonderful photography at: http://andeemcdonaldphotography.com/. I got some great pictures of Andee taking Lu's pics that cracked me up. Lucy is obviously good at being fierce. We had such a fun day! Andee took a few of the two of us that I really treasure.

Now on to the actual repurposing project! Andee asked me if I had any vintage-looking chairs around and of course I didn't. But I admire anyone who does have them sitting around! I decided I could just re-purpose one and see how it went. This was one of those one-night jobs that got the old adrenalin going. Once I started it, I just went hog wild.
    I went to D.I. and found a metal kitchen chair from about the 90's I'm gessing. I liked that it had a nice wood seat and figured I could somehow distress it. Oddly, I also realized it was the matching chair to the bakers rack I re-did back at the beginning of my blog! Too funny. Same metal, same design, etc. Somewhere out there are 3 other lonely chairs looking to get re-purposed...



The chair...before



     I decided I wanted to have a skirt on the chair, which seems sort of french-country and fun so I found this white skirt in the women's section and figured I could make it work. Then I tea-dyed the whole thing which took a few hours but was worth the wait. I threw it in the dryer after soaking it for a bit in some tea, and it came out perfect. Thank you Earl Grey!

I hot glued it (of course) to the underside of the seat, and then tore some strips to make into a rose. The white metal needed some serious work to make it look old, so I just took regular brown acrylic paint and wiped it on. Then I wiped on a little bit of black in certain parts, and stained the seat with the brown paint also. 

I love how it turned out and had to include some of the pictures Andee used for Lucy's photo shoot. (I also kind of love how Lucy turned out!)

A tacky 90's chair turns into a French Country/Shabby chair pretty quickly!