Dining Chair Re-Up

Back when Richard first joined the army he bought me a beautiful dining room table and chairs with part of his enlistment bonus. I love(d) this table, but I've always had conflicting feelings toward the chairs. #1 the seats are upholstered. #2 I wasn't crazy about the fabric choice on the chairs, they just really didn't reflect my personal style at all. We've moved several times now and have been through the red dirt of Hawaii and the gritty black sand of Arizona. The outside elements take a toll on your upholstery believe it or not. I attempted to oxyclean the upholstery about a year ago and it helped for a while, but then the fabric started looking dingy again.

I bought some fabric a while back on major discount that I had intentions of using as roman shades in the breakfast nook. Months later and it was still sitting in my laundry room on a shelf with the rest of my fabric remnants. All the sudden yesterday I had an epiphany that I could use this fabric to recover my chairs! I started off with one chair and I loved the result, but then started thinking I wanted more. I didn't want to tire of the same fabric overwhelming all six chairs. I played around with a few schemes with Megan over @. I finally decided to go with the flow of one pattern for every two chairs. I love the end result.

Here's the before picture of what the chairs look like straight from the manufacturer plus a few years of dirt, grim, and kids spilling stuff on them.



And after 2 days of pulling and stapling and running out of staples and buying four sets of the wrong size of staple, here is the end result.






And the fabric up close.



See the peacock and hummingbird??? This is the original fabric. I bought it because of those details. I love it!



^This one is on the two chairs with the arms. I like the pattern a lot but wasn't sure it was good to stick with my birdy friends allll the time, so it went on the two chairs that get stuck in another room occassionally.



And just a simple print to pull it all together.

I think I'm going to take the scraps from the three and attempt to make a table runner out of them. Or maybe some wall art?? I dunno. Guess you can't know if I don't!

And just for your viewing pleasure, what happens when Mommy is busy decorating the house....



They were all over my house. I was finding them at 4 o'clock when I do a one last clean up in preparation for daddy to come home from work. Oh well, there are worse things for her to be playing with, huh?

I can't wait to share some other projects I am either working on or have formed in my head. In the meantime I'm going to attempt to take some pictures of those other two kids that live with me this weekend.