wannabe martha stewart
i know i mentioned this about a month ago, but since i’m still working on it i think i need to flesh it out a bit. i had something in mind for my dining room furniture for a long, long time. i don’t exactly have a dining room – we used the would-be dining room as a library instead – but a tiny tiled nook right off the kitchen. because it’s kind of narrow, i didn’t want chairs, i wanted benches. i wanted a nice solid trestle table and matching benches, painted white. seemed like a simple enough thing. but apparently i’m an idiot because i never found anything that even remotely fit my ideal. couldn’t even find a damn thing worth compromising for. i found myself contemplating patio furniture, but couldn’t find anything there, either. my mom volunteered to pay for custom furniture, but i’d be damned before i’d let her do that. she already has paid for so much.
irritated, i just shelved the thought of any furniture at all while we worked on the kitchen – until we saw an unfinished table and benches at ikea. (god, i love that place.) it wasn’t a trestle table and the benches were kind of small, but hey, we’re small people and the price was good and goddammit, if we don’t buy this now i just know we’ll end up buying it later. so we bought them and they lived in the library for a long time, unassembled and growing dusty. every once in a while, we’d discuss what we’d do with them. as our kitchen came together (blue cabs, green walls, gray/black checkerboard floor – yes, we’re colorblind, why do you ask?) it occurred to me that white furniture would looks kind of odd in there. i had planned for white when i had planned for a completely different kitchen than the one i ended up with. so we talked about light stain to match a butcher block island or even getting a paint match for the cabinet blue.
a few weeks back, i found myself desperately in need of a project, so i started harassing cam to help me pick a stain for the benches and table. even though the dining nook is absolutely full of stuff, i couldn’t get past the idea that i needed to take care of this right away. we selected a bright blue and i got to work.
the benches are done and the table needs another coat of poly on top. i would have done that coat of poly over the weekend, but my sewing machine is sitting on top of it because i’m sewing cushions for the benches. if i have an idea about something i can do, i’m a total scary fanatic, and that’s why i’ve gone all martha stewart on this project. for ages, i’ve been on the lookout for a nice fabric for my cushions and possibly for curtains. i had this idea of stripes, but never could find any that i liked well enough. about a month ago i bought a pair of mitts from target’s summer section. they were clearance items, so they were about $2 each. bright blue stripes with white and green stripes here and there. i showed my mom one day and she commented on how it would have been nice if i had found that material for the benches. i filed that one away with the intent of finding something to match. in my hunt for fabrics, i looked at the messiness (potential and actual) of my family and decided that either a sunbrella fabric or oilcloth would be the way to go – but my choices turned out to be either too expensive (sunbrella) or too garish (oilcloth). feh. so... one day at target i happened to be wandering about the seasonal clearance when i saw a plastic tablecloth in the same stripes as my mitts. it was about $2-3 and lined with a flannel-esque backing. it was way thin and way cheap, but it wasn’t bad, all things considered. i bought it and brought it home, but didn’t get started right away. when i did get started, i realized that it might be thin enough to tear from the stitch holes with a bit of pressure (oh, i don’t know, like from sitting on it?), but oh well, i’ve decided to finish them anyway because at least i’ll have something there and i can take more time to find something better. my sewing skills are not great, so i’m glad i picked a busy fabric to distract from them. my mom was kind enough to pick up some 2-inch foam for me the other day, so i cut it up (poorly) this weekend. 2-inch foam is so hard to cut with scissors! never again. the leftover foam piece i covered with another target tablecloth so now we have a nice big floor cushion for paul to lie on. the cushion project is finally starting to take shape. pun not intended, of course.
i’ll have to post a picture when i’m done with everything because i have a feeling that as crappy as the end result might be, i’m going to be so freaking proud that i did this myself.