Our TV Console Gets an Upgrade

I’ve always been intrigued by the ways that some people modify furniture for different purposes, and I’ve always wanted to take on a project of my own.  But I also have a tough time taking a nice, solid wood piece of furniture and modifying it a ton. So when I came across this decent but not super nice dresser at the Goodwill near my house and discovered that one of the drawers wasn’t in the best of shape, I knew it was a great candidate to be repurposed.

The plan? Make it into a TV console to replace our blond Ikea (maybe, might as well be) TV stand in our living room. I would take the middle drawer out, add a shelf, and then convert the drawer front into a door that closes when we’re not watching TV. Perfect!

I'm Sorry, You're Gonna Have to Find Somewhere Else to Sit

Remember this pretty little chair that I pictured last week with my desk?

Well, now look at her:

Excuse the smart phone-quality photo above. 

She was pretty by herself (yes, it's a she) and might have looked better in another room, but I thought she 1) didn't connect well enough with my room in her deep turquoise state and 2) looked childish next to a borderline, could-go-both-ways desk that some people thought would look nice in a little girl's room. It would, but that's not exactly the look I'm going for at nearly 25. I'm all for feminine, but I want it to be sophisticated too. So in an effort to make this chair grow up a bit, I plan to refinish it. Not paint it, but actually sand and stain it. And that required me to strip all the paint off.

My first attempt, with the chair fully assembled, was mildly successful. Still, I had a really hard time getting in all the crevices to remove paint. After all, if I'm going to go to this much trouble to refinish a chair, I'm going to do it right. I also think there is part of me that knows my grandpa, who did an amazing job refinishing antique furniture all the time, would do a nearly perfect job, and there's some romance and nostalgia in trying to emulate his old-school, high-quality craftsmanship.

After doing quite a bit of googling, I found one website that gave instructions on how to disassemble a chair. Duh! Why didn't I think of that before? It's the same strategy I used when I refinished my coffee table last fall. So I bought a $5 rubber mallet from Home Depot and used it to knock all the pieces out of their joints.

And boy oh boy did that make my life easier. I know that this "chair" is going to be so much easier to sand in pieces too, which is important because I need to do a very thorough job. Tonight I'm going to make one more attempt at stripping some stubborn residue off the pieces, wash it down with mineral spirits, and start sanding. Oh yes, I'm also going to write a blog post so you can see our new, pretty TV stand. Fingers crossed that I don't stay up till 2 am doing it!

Update: I just linked up to Shine Your Light's "Before" edition of her February's Before and After link party. So I have to finish this by the end of the month! Although I'm hoping it will be sooner :)

Pretty Pillow Plans

In mid-January Kristen Krason posted this gorgeous mood board on her blog, 6th Street Design School (one of the blogs I check almost daily).

Source: 6thstreetdesignschool.blogspot.com via Sarah on Pinterest

Oh, those colors! I love them. You've seen my affinity for raspberry pink in the past week, and I love how this mood board incorporates that with chartreuse and aqua -- two more colors that. I. love. And those pillows! The second I saw pillow #1 I knew it was what our living room needed to look a little more cohesive.

Source: fabric.com via Sarah on Pinterest

Now, remember that this month is No Shop January. In early January I laid out some ground rules, and in those ground rules I allotted money for a blender and a yoga Groupon -- two things I did not purchase. I also saw that the beautiful pillow fabric on fabric.com was on clearance and there wasn't much left. So, after three weeks of admiring it, I finally bought the fabric. Note: As of posting this, fabric.com is showing 8 yards left. 

I bought three yards totaling $41, but I had a coupon to bring it down to $35 (just enough to still get the free shipping!). That should be enough to make at least two pillows and maybe cover a lampshade or a chair.

Last night my roommate and I sat on our couch admiring how much our living room was coming together. The TV wasn't even on. We were watching the room. And we should've been going to sleep. We're having a Superbowl party just because we like the new TV stand I made, and so we can cook a bunch of the stuff we saw on pinterest. Can't wait to get this fabric so I can sew up some pretty pillow and make it look even nicer!

Update: The piece of furniture that my roomie and I were admiring is now posted here. And I just found out that my fabric is coming tomorrow. Yay!

Project Updates

Hey friends! Wow -- I owe a big THANK YOU to Miss Mustard Seed because her Furniture Feature Friday sent a ton of traffic to the desk I posted last week. If you found this blog from her lovely site, I'm very glad to have you!

This weekend I wrapped up work on a project that has been a long time coming, and made it just in time for the Superbowl party my roommates want to host this weekend. I'm just waiting on some hardware to finish 'er off. Which should come today. Yay!

Not surprisingly, the hardware is from Anthropologie. I got it on sale, so I was able to keep the very pretty knobs to $3/piece (plus shipping). This purchase will involve a return (and trip to the Anthropologie store, double yay!) because I couldn't decide which hardware I wanted. I'm incredibly indecisive, so I use this strategy probably too often. Oh well, whenever I watch HGTV Sarah and Genevieve and Candace always bring in multiple options and choose their favorites.

I'm leaning towards one right now, but I'm going to wait to make my final decision until I test them out tonight. It's so hard to see what something will look like until you actually test it out. Here's a glimpse of my purchase:

Note that I bought 9 of one type of knob, which I did because the review noted that they weren't totally well constructed. I need 7. Consider the extra two backups.

I'll be back tomorrow, Wednesday, Thursday, or whenever I get around to photo-editing/writing the post.

P.S. Man oh man, I have a crazy hankering for Bodo's Bagels right now. Is that weird? It's a favorite food spot right across from the UVA campus ("grounds", otherwise known as). Fellow former Charlottesville residents--does this ever strike you? Or maybe you are craving Take It Away? $2 pitchers (duh)? Do you ever get a crazy hankering for your favorite college food? Is this a sign that I need to go back to grad school? Or take a day trip to Charlottesville? Does anyone want to go with me? Is this too many questions?

OK, back to work.

Adventures in Sewing a Zipperless Pillow

Like many women, I love me a beautiful throw pillow. Textiles are just so purty and pillows are one of the easiest ways to soften up a room. They’re also a great way to add personality to a basic couch or duvet. In the case of our house, they’re a way to dress up our hand-me-down couch.

Before I dive into this little pillow-making tutorial, first let me introduce you to my new(ish) friend, Suzy the sewing machine:

She’s a pre-WWII Singer Featherweight sewing machine. So she’s kind of a new-to-me situation. My grandma has a similar one that she and my mom have used to sew many beautiful things, including both of these lovely Halloween costumes:

That pumpkin isn't on my dress -- it was on the scanned picture. Side note: Don't ever dress your 5 year old up like a bride for Halloween. She will not know how to answer the question, "Where's your groom?" every time she rings a doorbell, and so she will get snotty. And if you are 5 and you're reading this, 1) how impressive and 2) definitely pick what you want to be for Halloween before your mom gets any ideas.

But I digress.

My mom always wanted my sister and I to have our own featherweights, and she saw this one at the shop where she took hers to get serviced. It was a very pleasant non-birthday, non-Christmas surprise. Suzy doesn’t have a lot of bells and whistles, so she’s very easy to use. I decided to break her out and make a pillow for my first project.

I bought this pink patterned fabric on fabric.com, but before you go chasing it down, you should know that I bought it over a year ago. That seems to be a theme this week.

I decided to do a zipperless pillow because, well, zippers intimidated me. My mom always made them sound hellish, but she was always sewing clothes costumes. I found out last month that when it comes to pillow sewing, zippers are pretty easy. But I consider this pillow more of a step one, so we’re starting here.

I picked up a 14” pillow on sale at Joann’s Fabrics. In hindsight, I wish I had splurged a little bit more because this pillow is very flat. Next time I will buy something a little more plush.

First, I measured and cut a piece of fabric about 16” square. That sounds like a lot, but, it’s better to cut too big than too small. And this was my first try, so I was leaving room for error. I cut the back pieces after looking at a flap-close pillow I had at home, and I determined that the overlap should be an inch or two. With about a ½” hem, that meant that I needed between two and three inches more than my initial 16” square, so I cut a piece of fabric to be 16” x 19”. Then I cut the 19” piece in half.  

Next came the sewing process. I needed to hem the overlap sides first so that it could be sewed into the square, so I folded one side of each of the smaller pieces over and sewed a hem. Once those two pieces were hemmed on the open side, I placed the 16” square face up, and placed the two back pieces face down so that all the sides lined up. Then I pinned around the sides, pointing the pins towards the center of the pillow.

 

Once all the pins were in, I was ready to start sewing. I started in one corner, reinforcing the initial stich by sewing forward, backward, and then forward again. After going around all four sides, I reinforced the last stitches and cut the thread. Then I picked another corner, reinforced the first stitch, and sewed around the square again.

After I finished sewing, I turned the pillow inside out so that it was, well, no longer inside out.  Then I placed my pillow form inside the pillowcase.

And that’s when I determined it looked really, really limp. No worries! I took the pillow form out and flipped the pillow cover inside out again. I did another two stiches about ½” inside the original stitches to shrink the size of the pillow. Then I tested the pillow again, and it looked much better. Once I determined that the pillow cover was the right size, I took it off the pillow, cut the edges to shrink the excess a bit, and cut the corners diagonally so that there wasn’t a bunch of extra fabric stuffed in the corner.

Now the pink pillow resides on our couch, but I’m thinking about snatching it for my bed soon. Of course, that will be after I sew some new ones for the couch. Oh, and don't be fooled into thinking that I still have my Christmas decorations up. This was just the best picture I have of our couch pillows right now. Which reveals that yes, I completed this project a little while ago. You caught me. 

Has anyone else taken up a new sewing project lately? 

Moroccan Stenciled Desk

Guys. I’m really excited to present this project to you not only because I’m pumped about the way it turned out, but because it represents a major victory against months of procrastination. It's also a victory for No Shop January because I had already purchased all the materials to finish it forever ago, it was just a matter of getting it done.

A month after we moved into our house, I bought a solid wood white desk on craigslist. It needed a lot of work, so I took it directly into our basement where I immediately got to work on it  it sat for 5 months. In my defense, I bought it in mid-October, which can kind of be the end of the furniture-revamping season on account of the shorter and colder days. But really that’s not a good excuse, because all I needed to do was sand, it’s not like I needed to paint it outside.

Here's the before:

And here's the after:

Guest Post at Chic Done Cheap: Tips for Refinishing Furniture

Hey friends! Check out my guest post on Chic Done Cheap where I shared some tricks for refinishing furniture (like my coffee table)!