Stool

Nursing stool

Well, the baby hasn’t arrived yet (only a week and a half to go to due date!).  In the meantime, I’ve been finishing off the upholstery side of the rocking stool that came with our nursing chair from my lovely friend Helen.  All it needed was a staple gun!

The edges aren’t the most professional, mostly because I don’t have a clue what I’m doing, but definitely fit for our purposes.

photo 1

All we need to do now is wait for the weather to brighten up a bit (more snow due this week, folks!), and then set about painting the wood white – I think it really would make it.

More cushions

Chair with seat and back

I’ve just finished the back cushion for the nursing chair.  I sewed it much the same as the seat cushion, except it was much thinner, so I managed to sew the fourth side closed, rather than having to use velcro like I did with the seat.

I tried to judge where the tabs were to attach it to the chair by eye, just looking at the old cushion cover.  This went drastically wrong, and the velcro was hanging on by the skin of its metaphorical teeth because the tabs were in the wrong place.

Chair with seat back and cushions



When Barry then yanked the cushion off the seat (WHY?) on the day I finished it, I then burst into tears and had a bit of a paddy.  Mostly baby-related, I’m sure.  I’ve now taken the tabs off and reattached them, using the chair as a guide this time instead of, erm, nothing.

The arms have also now been completed.  These were made from scratch with some foam I bought from eBay.  The previous arm cushions had three press studs on the underside of each arm to hold them in place, so I also bought some silver coloured heavy duty studs from eBay that I hoped would fit the same studs (they did, phew!).

Chair with armsI sewed a pocket into the cushions (as the previous ones had them, although I’m not sure I’ll use them), and used the sewing machine to close all four sides.  When the heavy duty studs arrived, it turns out they weren’t long enough to go through several layers of heavy duty upholstery fabric, so Barry tested them and it turned out they can go through two layers.  I had to unpick one side of the sewing I’d done, Barry got to work in a manly fashion to hammer the studs into place, and then I resewed (is that a word?) that side closed.

Arm pocket

It’s not amazing craftsmanship, so you can’t look too closely, but I am very proud of this chair!  I’m hoping when the weather brightens up a bit, Barry will take up the painting mantle and paint it white.

Just waiting now for some staples to arrive and we can do the last part – the stool.

Nursery accessories

Birdcage light

Had a quick shop for a couple of bits for the nursery – we’ve bought this lovely little pendant birdcage light from Argos, and I ummed and ahhed about getting the matching table lamp but we’ve decided not to for now.

Also, as I’ve been doing the nursing chair up, I thought it may be nice to get a couple of coordinating cushions to go on the chair which will henceforth be grey.  I nipped into Primark on the offchance that they had some pretty pink ones, and they had these little treasures.  The buttons are (hopefully) too big for a child to eat and they’ll look lovely on the new chair.  And what a bargain – only £3 each.Pink cushions

Fixing up the chair

Fabric

Following on from my post about the nursing chair, we collected the 5m of lovely velvety grey fabric that I bought from eBay (finally, a purchase that’s gone right!), and it came in a huge roll that seems a bit overwhelming!

The books from the library were useless.  Well, that’s a bit unfair – they were useless for my purposes. Lots of talk about hammers and ripping stuff up.  I’m just re-covering cushions, so I’ve returned the books and I’m just muddling through.

I’ve decided not to repaint the chair’s frame right now, because the weather is appalling and we’d never get it done outside at the moment.  Nor do I particularly want to be breathing in noxious fumes inside!  We can always do that later if the mood strikes us – it would definitely look brilliant in white.

Sewing cushionThe chair has a seat, back, two arm cushions and a stool that need re-covering, so I thought I’d start with the most simple of them all, the seat.

I started by cutting a piece of fabric bigger than the size of the cushion I was covering, big enough to go up the sides as well.  Using Charlie’s sewing machine, I stitched it inside out on three sides, stabbing myself repeatedly with pins.  Quite literally, there’s been my blood, sweat and tears over these cushions.

I then cut away the excess fabric around where I’d sewn and turned the cover the right way around.

Sewing cushion 2This made me happy, because it was actually starting to look like a cushion.

Because the sewing machine isn’t an upholstery one, try as I might, I could not for the life of me get it to stitch the fourth side because the cushion was too thick for it to get anywhere near the needle.  I ended up stitching velcro to each side of the join (having taken the cushion out again, harder than it sounds), and velcroing it shut.

I then made two tabs for the back, to attach it to the chair frame, again with velcro on, and again, much harder than I just made that sound (it took about five attempts to get it right).  Et voilà!

Nursing cushion