DIY Metal Chair Makeover

Hello cyber-world!

It's been far too long since my last visit.  *Shoutout to Chanel and Chara* I appreciate my sisters for doing their best to breathe life back into this blog, and I am going to try to do the same.

All I'll say is that it has been a crazy time in my life.  Our family has moved from Nevada to Indiana, and we're still settling in...I have almost nothing hung on the walls of my house, and each room has it's own stack (or two) of boxes left to unpack.  I have always been a West Coast girl, so adjusting to the weather & humidity here is still a little difficult for me.  But, despite all the challenges that this move has caused, I believe it has been, and will be, a good thing for our family.  One of the few constants in life is change.  All we can do is buckle up, say a prayer, and enjoy the ride!

I did this DIY a little while ago, but I just never made post about it.  So here goes!

Have you ever bought something because 1) it was really cheap, and 2) you could see potential for something awesome with a small, easy makeover, but then it just sat in your house looking sad and unfinished for years?  That's what had happened to me.

I bought these chairs off of a friend that was selling them for really cheap.  My vision for them over the years has changed slightly (as I have found that my decorating style has evolved over the past few years), but I finally found some fabric at Wal-Mart on clearance that I was ABSOLUTELY in love with!  So I brought it home, and decided the time had come to tear the chairs apart!

Luckily, the paint on my chairs wasn't peeling off like crazy.  I did not feel the need to sand it or remove the previous paint in any way (mostly because I'm lazy, but also because I was so excited to get started that I was ready to just jump right in).  I broke it down, bought some spray paint, and went straight to work!

While I patiently impatiently waited for each coat to dry, I would work on the cushions.

 This is the old fabric (on the left) next to the new fabric (on the right).

 

This is how I tackled this part of the project:

 

Step 1: Lay my old cushion (with the old fabric still on, because I'm not cool like my sister) on the new fabric, and cut out a rough square.  Pull the sides up and over to make sure it covers everything before you cut.

 

Step 2: Pull gently on the sides and start stapling them down on the backside.  You don't want to pull it too tight, or you'll have weird dips in your cushion on the other side.  So pull gently, but try to get it snug.

Step 3: The corners...some people have a specific strategy when it comes to their corners.  I just folded a little, and stapled it in place, and folded some more, and stapled in place. In the end, my corners looked just fine!

Step 4: Reduce some of the bulk around the corners.  All you have to do is take a pair of scissors and cut those little flags hanging off of each corner until it looks nice to you.

TA DA!

Step 5: This is the really fun part!  Once you have followed all the directions on your package of spray paint/clear coat (or...gotten so fed up with it that you settle for no clear coat because you just can't wait to finish...) you can put it all together!

Voila!  I was so happy with how these turned out.  I've got the bug now!  I want to recover every piece of furniture in my house!

Just too cute to pass up!

And don't they just look great with my newly acquired piece of furniture? (Thanks to my mother-in-law!  How did she know I would love it so much? <3)

I hope everyone has a happy Monday!

If you see a project, recipe, kids activity, or life hack that you'd like us to try, let us know!

DIY Chair Reupholstery

Well I think I have now caught the DIY bug.  Ever since I recovered our sofa, I want more projects to do!  My sister-in-law gave me this one; an old upholstered dining room chair that she uses at her desk now.  I don't know about you, but that dusty rose fabric just wasn't quite her cup of tea...or mine either for that matter!

Part I:  The Deconstruction

This one was pretty easy to start off, just ripping all that nasty pink fabric off with my trusty screwdriver and pliers.  I saved all the fabric from the back to use as pattern pieces, and the batting was also saved for re-use.

When I started ripping the fabric off the seat cushion, I discovered that this was apparently not the first time this chair has been reupholstered!  It had another layer of red-orange velvet underneath, even uglier than the pink!  Shocking, I know.

So that was promptly stripped off as well (don't worry, no more layers of fabric under that!), down to the seat cushion.

Part II:  The Reconstruction

I used those pieces of gross old fabric as my pattern pieces, leaving about an extra 1/2" all the way around so I'd be able to fold the fabric under and get clean edges on the chair.

I started with the back of the chair.  I stapled down the first back piece since that was going be covered up by another layer anyway, and you can't see the staples from the back.  Then I attached the batting and top layer of fabric, folding the edges under as I went and gluing them down with Tacky Glue.  Anyone who knows me knows that I use Tacky Glue for pretty much everything!  If you've never used it, try it now!!   It is so worth your investment!

Anyway, as I went along pulling the fabric tight and gluing it down, I started adding these decorative upholstery tacks that we got at Home Depot (for the entire chair I used about 1 1/2 boxes of the tacks).  You could do the tacks as a solid border all the way around instead of spacing them out, but you'd need 3 or 4 times as many.


The tacks were easy enough to hammer in, but I did have some that bent and ended up in the trash.  This was another reason why I glued the fabric instead of stapling it; I didn't want any exposed staples under the tacks.  The hardest part of this was probably going around the corners and still getting my folded edges to be clean.  But thank goodness for that glue!

When I did the seat, I started by pulling my fabric tight over the seat and stapling it in a couple places so it would stay tight.  The I just removed the staples as I went along gluing and adding the tacks.

And there it is!  All done!  Pretty simple and straightforward.  Comment below if you have any questions or comments and thanks for reading, everyone!!

DIY Sofa Reupholstery and the Revival of the Blog

This blog...this poor, poor blog.  So sad, lost and forgotten!  It's been FOUR MONTHS since the last post!  However I do take comfort in knowing I made that post, meaning I'm slightly less of a slacker than my two lovely sisters...right? :) Just kidding ladies.

But really, we have all been so bad about this.  I think my biggest issue is that I have felt like the most boring person ever and that I didn't have anything interesting to share...until now!

So we have this sofa...this incredibly ugly yet very comfortable freebie sofa that was given to us by some family friends.  I cannot begin to describe how much I disliked this sofa, or really just the upholstery.  That 80's green and pink floral just wasn't my cup of tea at all.  Right after we got married we tried a slipcover on it and that did not turn out well.  Because the back cushions are more pillow-like it just looked lumpy and the slipcover wouldn't stay put.  That solution only lasted about a day.  So it went back to being that hideous floral print.

After that first slipcover debacle I decided I wanted to cover just the cushions and pillows, and then slipcover the rest so it would look at least halfway decent without being lumpy.  Jared, however, wanted me to redo the ENTIRE thing because of his hatred of slipcovers in any form.  We went back and forth about this for a while.  Was he crazy?  I couldn't try to take on an entire sofa for my first reupholstering project...or could I?

Finally, a couple weeks ago I decided I was just going to do it.  I read tons of tutorials from Pinterest and did my best to prepare...and so it began!


PART I: The Cushions

Originally I thought the cushions would be the easiest part of this project.  I had made pillow covers before, so how hard could it be?  Boy was I wrong.

The back cushion/pillows were simple enough, and they only took me about an evening and a half between cutting all the pieces and sewing them together.

Then we get to the pain-in-the-rear seat cushions.  They don't even have any piping on them, again leading me to believe that they'd be easy.  But the way that they were constructed ended up being a lot more complicated than I thought.  Since the cushions will vary from sofa to sofa, I'll just give you my tips for making the whole process easier instead of a step-by-step.

Tip #1: Use what you have! I started by ripping one of the existing cushion covers apart with a seam ripper to reference as pattern pieces.  I also re-used the existing zippers because I was having a hard time finding zippers that would be long enough.

Tip #2: Get the right needles and thread! Part of what made these take so long was that I didn't have the right kind of sewing machine needles for this fabric.  They were #80 universal needles, and my fabric was a fairly thick woven.  I broke about 5 needles before I gave up and got more heavy duty (#100, Denim) needles the next day.  **Make sure you have the correct needles for the type of fabric you have!  When in doubt, the people at the fabric/craft store will usually be able to help.**  You will save a lot of time and frustration, not to mention a lot of broken needles.

Tip #3: Pinterest it up!  Especially if you're a beginner at this, find as many tutorials as you can on Pinterest, YouTube, etc.  I've done a good handful of sewing projects so I wasn't a total beginner, but I had never had to sew a zipper before...I always made my mom do it. :)  So I found this blog that teaches you how to sew zippers!  So handy!


PART II: The Frame

Supplies you may need:
- Flathead screwdrivers for removing staples (I had a few different sizes on hand)
- Pliers of some sort for removing really stubborn staples
- Thick gloves (these will come in handy when you're taking the staples out of the fabric)
- A vessel for collecting staples as you go

This part seems so daunting, but in reality it's much easier than it seems.  I started by ripping that sucker apart piece by piece.  I completely discarded the skirt and piping from around the bottom since I was way too lazy to attempt redoing that.  I pulled the back piece off on the top and sides, but left it attached along the bottom.  I wanted to have the existing batting and fabric to use as a reference for my new piece.

I did something similar on the end pieces, leaving most of it attached along the bottom and partway up the sides.  Before you start attaching new fabric, it's a good idea to vacuum out the inside of the sofa.

These arm caps were easy to remove since they were simply nailed in.  I also removed the piping from around the edges of these (again...way too lazy and I didn't think it was necessary).

Once you've got it taken apart it's easier to see how the whole thing is put together and which pieces need to go on first.  I started with the inside back piece and the front along the bottom.  Since I had a fabric with a large pattern, I made sure it was mostly centered on the sofa.  Then just pull, tuck, and staple away!  I used my cheapo $10 staple gun and it didn't do too bad.  Because I'm still lazy, I didn't bother removing the existing fabric.  I just removed the staples that attached it to the inside frame so I could pull the new fabric through.

Next came the tops/insides of the arms.  That was one of the easiest parts, surprisingly.  Just fold and staple so it fits the curve!

For the sides of the arms, I started by stapling along the top, with my new piece of fabric flipped over so I could staple underneath it and the staples wouldn't show.  Hopefully this makes sense with the photos.

The last big piece was the back.  Originally the sides of the back piece were attached using metal tack strips, which I took out and discarded since I wasn't sure how well they would work to reuse.  I stapled the top of this piece using the same tactic I used to do the end pieces so I wouldn't have staples showing along the top.

I ended up just stapling outside of the fabric on the vertical edges of the back.  I originally didn't want to have staples showing, but since the fabric pattern is mostly grey they don't really show too bad here.  No harm done.  I did end up having to get some longer staples for this part because there were so many layers of fabric to go through at this point.

The arms caps were very last.  Just staple the new fabric over the old!  I didn't bother taking them all apart.  The nails stayed where they were and it was pretty easy to just hammer them back in place through the fabric.

Ta da!!!  This whole process only took about a day.  The only part I didn't finish that day was stapling all the edges onto the bottom of the sofa.


PART III: The Reveal

Drumroll please.....

Voila!  I am so happy with how this turned out!  I thought I couldn't do it, but the parts I thought would be hard turned out to be the easiest, and vice versa.  Of course I never would have done it if my dear sweet husband hadn't believed I could (he's pretty proud of himself for being right). :)

So there you have it!  Comment below if you want any more details or have any questions!

Roses are Paper, Light is Truth...

News flash! In case you're wondering, I didn't die! I'm still very much alive, I just kind of dropped off the face of the blogging planet for a little while...or a long while depending on how eternal your perspective is... I could make a ton of excuses and all of them would be quite valid (except for the one where I ended up looking at cat pictures for a few hours and watching Star Wars on Valentines Day...we won't get into that) but let's just say "It's Cleopatra and Caesar and they brought a salad!" wait-- what? Now that I've distracted you with my clever Aladdin reference we'll get down to the good stuff.
I've got to come up with a name for this mental condition I think I've acquired... Maybe "Blograzy Disorder"...It's symptoms mostly involve talking to yourself in "blog" language... I make up these fantastic blog posts in my head and I quite often find myself commentating on my life in real time as if I'm blogging it...It's a little creepy but hopefully it helps me give you something worthwhile tonight!
I have so many things I could tell you about, hopefully I can narrow it down to something interesting!

So I wanted to come up with something significant and profound to write about on the blog this week and looking back I've realized that most of my posts could come off as really preachy and self-righteous. I never meant for them to come off that way so if any of you got that impression, I'm really sorry! I am nowhere near perfect and I have a long way to go. My only hope is that I can share bits and pieces of that journey with you so perhaps it can help you come closer to Christ.

After that horribly long (and hopefully not boring) intro, here it is! For real!

This morning when I woke up I had one of those mornings when you wake up in the perfect position and you think "if I move I'm going to ruin it! I just need to stay right here forever and everything will be okay!" Well when the alarm is going off, you don't stay in that position for long! I got in the shower and the water was the PERFECT temperature! I thought "if I just stay in here forever my life will be dandy" but then you know what really happens, you just get pruney and late. So, regretfully leaving the shower behind, I did a short morning yoga routine, put on my "new" shirt (pretty sure I got it for 5 dollars at Goodwill...shhhhh) and did my makeup. By the time I ate my breakfast and had my lunch all set and I looked at the clock, I was over 20 minutes late to seminary! It was 6:43 and I hadn't even tried to start Suzy (my car) yet! I grumbled to myself and ran out the door.
When I finally did get to seminary, it made the whole morning (even leaving my bed and shower) sooo worth it! We were talking about Doctrine and Covenants Section 88. I walked in, to my teacher asking "What is light?" He did that funny thing that teachers do when they are looking for a certain answer so even though the fifty answers you come up with are right, they're not what they want so they're all wrong. Until one kid finally said "Truth!" and the teacher pointed at him and said "yes!" as if that's what we all should have known from the first time he asked, right!? Silly teachers! Anyway, he went on to talk about real light and how it extends infinitely, even if it's eventually infinitely faint. It's kind of a mind boggling concept that light continues forever and doesn't stop, until you look at it with a spiritual perspective rather than a worldly and logical one. On the board he drew a circle representing the Son (which in verse 7 says: This is the light of Christ. As also he is in the sun, and the light of the sun... I've always loved that those words are the same Son and sun) He drew the earth in the infinite light of the Son, demonstrating that Christ's light is EVERYWHERE! Verse 12 states: "Which light proceedeth forth from the presence of God to fill the immensity of space." I'd read this before but I hadn't dug into this concept as deeply as my teacher did this morning. (Sorry this is long, hold on! It gets even better!) Christ is light and truth and so, Christ fills the immensity of space! My mind is officially boggled by thinking about the whole "everywhere at once" thing, but the Holy Ghost confirms to me that it's so true!
He went on to talk about how God created our Spirits from intelligences, which he explained to be God's basic building blocks for creating the world pretty much. What makes God so powerful is his power over intelligence, which always obeys Him because he ALWAYS acts in light and truth. I know I'm getting kinda deep here, just bear with me! I feel like this is explained in verse 13 which says: "The light which is in all things, which giveth life to all things, which is the law by which all things are governed, even the power of God who sitteth upon His throne, who is the bosom of eternity, who is in the midst of all things." Oh there are SO many more amazing things in this section, I highly encourage you to read it while pondering and praying about this concept! So intelligence is governed by God and God created our Spirits from intelligence, should we not also obey God? Well we should, but he gave us AGENCY! I'd like to believe that agency is more than the ability to choose, but to temporarily govern the intelligence of our Spirits. He allows us to use this power, knowing that we will make mistakes and betray Him and His light. What a precious gift this is! As His children, we wield the power over our own intelligence! Perhaps that is the light of Christ that God gave every man, the glory in this light and truth that we are literally made of. We can follow Him in light and truth, as our Spirits want to, or we can follow the natural desire to sin that comes from the effects of the Fall.
Back to this morning, after the lesson I was definitely spiritually enriched! I went to school and I had a free first period, so I went into the library and pulled out my triple combination and my Preach My Gospel to study it further. It was fascinating and exciting! I surprised myself too! If you had told me a year ago I would be sitting in the middle of the library at school with my scriptures in plain view I may have lovingly punched your shoulder and said you were crazy. Crazy how much strength and courage Christ can give you over time. I could be doing so many more "amazing" things like that if I depended on Him more. So as I pondered this business with intelligences and light and truth, a scripture I had heard many times came to mind: "The glory of God is intelligence..." I searched it (thank you gospel library app!) and found it in D&C 93:36- "The glory of God is intelligence, or, in other words, light and truth." As I scrolled up and down the section I saw that it was ALL about light and truth and intelligence! I kindof wanted to do a little happy dance but I didn't (you're welcome world...) I looked it up in my paper scriptures and started reading. God is so good! The scriptures are amazing!!! I thought of yet another scripture: Moses 1:39 For behold, this is my work and my glory--to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man." This just made another connection that "the glory of God is intelligence" or "the immortality and eternal life of man." They are connected, or even one in the same.
Anyway, I learned a few more things from section 93 (another VERY HIGHLY recommended read!) but I won't share all of them. I don't know if anyone out there needed this message, but I know it sure re-sparked my testimony today! I love this gospel and all the connections and analogies we can draw from it! It is so extensive, it makes it so that you are NEVER done learning about the gospel! Sound daunting? No! Try, exciting! You'll never run out of little gospel treasures! What a quest to embark on!


SOOOOO...since the glory of God is intelligence and "if a person gains more knowledge and intelligence in this life through his diligence and obedience..., he will have so much the advantage in the world to come" (D&C 130:19) I decided to learn something new. I've been seeing things on Pinterest for paper flowers for a long time, but after my experience with the nails (oh my goodness what a nightmare!) my faith in Pinterest was definitely wavering! Nevertheless, with Valentines Day coming up I decided to try it a couple of weeks ago. My experience was as follows...
Monday afternoon. Thinking "dude! You're such a loser you haven't posted on the blog for forever! You need to do something RIGHT NOW!" (because that's how I talk to myself...maybe I didn't need to tell you that). So I saw the flowers and became determined to give it a whirl! I am proud to report that my trust in Pinterest has been greatly heightened! It was a success!
I made my very own paper rose!

This is how you can do it too:

 "If I can learn to do it, you can learn to do it! Tell yourself it's easy and it's true! You can learn to do it too!!!" (if you sang that in your head- may I give you a virtual high five and say well done)

This isn't the best picture of them, but I was up past 1am writing this post so I didn't want to find a better one...

~Step by step Paper Rose Tutorial~

 

Gather materials:

paper (colored, newspaper, sheet music, scrapbook paper etc. Get creative!)

glue stick

scissors

wire, floral tape and 2 small beads (1/8'ish diameter) (these are for the stem on your flower)

First cut the desired paper into three 4' by 4' squares

I used a paper cutter to make it perfect but you really don't have too I'm just a little OCD:) They can also really be any size, but I found 4' to be the best size to work with and it turns out looking the best too.

Then fold them in half, corners across-ways to make a triangle.

Then do it again! (The triangle is 1/4 of what the original paper was if that makes sense)

Then do it AGAIN! If you're paper were a pie you should have a 1/8 slice of it.

Then, just like we used to do when we made snowflakes in elementary school, cut the top off so it's a rounded shape. You don't want it too drastically curved but you definitely don't want it straight across! It should look like a tear drop shape.

Repeat with all three squares so you have 3 "tear drops"



Use the first one as a template to make the other curves the same

Then unfold all of them so you have 3 little scalloped "pies"

From the first "pie" cut out 1 slice out of the 8. Keep the slice! You'll use it!

From the next "pie" cut out 2 slices or wedges so you have a pie with 6 wedges and a 2 wedge piece. Once again, keep the 2 wedge piece.

Then, you guessed it! Cut out a 3 wedge piece from the remaining pie.

SO! Now you have 6 different pieces: a 7 wedge piece, a 6 wedge piece, a 5 wedge piece, a 3 wedge piece, a 2 wedge piece and a 1 wedge piece!

Try and cut right along the lines

Roll the wedges and glue the ends together so you have 6 cone-like things

You can have a good amount of overlap on the larger ones, I'd say up to a 1/2'

Next, trim a teeny tiny bit off of the bottom tip of the cone. Just enough that you can fit the wire through.

Then, curl the edges of your scalloped cones. Each wedge-end scallop will be a petal so you should curl it down a little to look like a petal. This will also cover the awkward gaps between layers of your flower (you'll understand in a second)

Now it's time to make your stem. Take about 8' of wire and take your little bead and put it about  3' down. Bend the wire back and twist it around the itself so the bead doesn't move around.

Then, take your smallest cone and put the stem through the bottom hole. "Thread" the second biggest cone onto the wire and under the first one so they kindof fit into each other and start to look like a flower! Add on the third, fourth, fifth and sixth layers in order of size. You can rotate the layers so the petals are staggered to look more realistic.

Then, once you've got everything in place, (if it moves, don't worry, it's easy to shift back when you're done) take another bead and put it on the short end of the wire sticking out of the bottom. Twist this wire around the longer strand and until it is securely holding the layers up. If you want to, you can take the bottom end of the wire and bend it up and twist it around itself to make the stem a little thicker and sturdier.

You can then cover it in floral tape by twisting it tightly around the wire. This makes your stem green and hides the bead and wire twisting. This is kinda hard and takes some practice. My first flower didn't look that great either...

I can speculate that you could use washi tape or frog tape on the bottom, but I'm not sure

And voila! Now you have a fun craft to share with family and friends and for gifts or cards. Sorry it wasn't in time for Valentines Day! Like I said, you can do it with all kinds of paper! I made a newspaper-ish one with some pages from my old Driver's Manual because I didn't have real newspaper. I believe in being resourceful :P

I taught my family how to make them for FHE one night and that was...an adventure. Not all of them are quite as crafty- or patient- as I am... But it could be a fun activity! Pinterest didn't fail me this time! Yay!

clearly James didn't enjoy this activity as much...

Once again, if you have any questions, comment below and I'll try and help as best I can!
Also, follow me and the Pinterest Perfect Sisters on Pinterest to get links to blog posts and the original inspirations!
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If you have any comments or anything you would like to see on here in the future, (things you've seen that you want to see how they REALLY work out?) let us know in the comments!
Thank you for reading! If you've made it all the way to here, I salute you! And thank you from the bottom of my heart.

NEXT WEEK look for another AMAZING recipe for Gluten Free Pancakes and hopefully something else really awesome that I'll come up with before then :)