A New Look for My Dining Room Chairs.

I've never loved my dining room set, but don't want to replace it until I find the perfect antique dining set.  I decided that since I will be living with this set for a while longer, I MUST recover the seats.  They are a very boring cream color and a few of the seats have small stains that I have tried to scrub off with no luck. 

So, off to Jo Ann fabrics I went, with coupon in hand, of course.  There, I found a beautiful fabric suitable for furniture.  It's a eucalyptus and tan stripe and made to look like silk (it's 100% polyester).  The total cost was $30 for 2 yards, 2 hours of my time, a staple gun and staples, and a screwdriver.

Fabric choice with area rug and curtains.

Here are a few before pictures.

1)Take the old seats off of the chair base.
2)Measure a piece of fabric large enough to wrap the top of the cushion with enough allowance to staple to the underside.
3)Lay fabric wrong side down on your work surface and put the cushion, top down, on the fabric.
4)Wrap the fabric so the edge comes to the underside and staple in the center of the top edge of the cushion.
5)Now, pull the fabric tightly, and put one staple in the center of the bottom edge of the fabric.

6)Alternating top and bottom, and continuing to pull fabric tightly, put a few more staples on the top and bottom.

7)Repeat steps 4, 5, and 6 on the right and left sides

8)For the corners, pull the fabric tightly over the corner and staple once or twice.

9)Neatly fold the fabric over the top of the corner and pull it firmly and staple in place.

10)Repeat step 9 the the side of the corner

11)Finish all 4 corners per steps 9 and 10

12)Staple the rest of the way around the fabric and trim off extra material

13)Flip the cushion over and admire your handy work!
14)Screw the cushion back onto the chair base.

And you just saved yourself $150 per chair (or at least that's what I told it would cost to recover ONE dining chair).

Here's the finished product and a "before and after" picture.

Do you like the before or after better?

Lindsay

Water Color Jellyfish

Another rainy day brings another craft from Liam.  Here's what you'll need: paper plate, water color paints or markers,streamers, double stick tape or glue, stapler, hole punch and pipe cleaner.

Cut the plate in half and let you child paint or color on the back of the plate. 

Rip streamers into 8-10 strips and let your child paint or color on the strips.

After the paint is dry, flip the 2 halves of the paper plate over and put a strip of double stick tape along the straight edge of the plate halves.

Tape the streamer strips to the inside of the plate halves. 

Take the 2 halves of the plates and put them together with the back of the plates facing out.  Staple all around the half circle.  Punch a hole in the top to thread a pipe cleaner through if you would like to hang it up. 

Let you child "swim" their jellyfish through the air.

Lindsay

Painted Goldfish

It's been raining here non stop and we even had a tornado come through the other day.  Needless to say, we have been trapped in the house for days on end.  BORING for me and Liam.  So this morning, we decided to do a project.  I google imaged goldfish outlines and printed out 3 of these in different sizes (daddy, mommy and baby).

I cut out the 3 fish and put them in the bottom of a shoe box with a few blobs of orange, red and yellow paint and 2 golf balls.  Ladies, please make sure that your husband does not mind if you use 2 of his golf balls for projects. 

Let your child shake the box. 

I think they turned out so cute.  The golf balls give the fish texture that looks like scales.

When the fish are dry you can glue them to a piece of paper.  I wanted to stick them on blue construction paper, but I couldn't find any. 

Lindsay

Summer Ruffle Scarf

It's hot out so you put on a cute little sundress to wear to dinner.  You walk into the restaurant and get blasted with the cold A/C.  You get seated only to find that the A/C vent is blowing right on you neck.  What to do?  Well, if your like me, you are prepared with a super cute light weight scarf to wrap around your neck.  Here are the directions to make an adorable, wear with everything and for every season, ruffle scarf made out of a t-shirt.  Here is a link to the directions (HERE) and a picute of my finished product.

It's easy, cheap and soooo cute!  Now run to the nearest dollar store and pick up some t-shirts!

Lindsay



Liam's Dr. Seuss 2nd Birthday Party!

What a blast!  Liam loved all of the decorations and is still singing "Happy Birthday" to himself.  I had been planning the party for quite some time and used several blogs for ideas.  You can click here and here and here to see some of my inspiration.  I also found a "Grinched" font on dafont.com.  You can download it for free.  For the graphics, I just did a Google image search and made my documents in Word.  If you have any questions or would like me to email any templates to you, please just send me an email or leave me a comment. 

For the menu:  The Apps were pretty light.  I just had green eggs and ham, cheese trees and multi colored goldfish crackers

Dinner: 
Thing1 & Thing 2 BBQ (BBQ chicken)
Poodles Noodles (pasta)
Who Roast Beast (roast sirloin)
Remarkable Foon's Sizzling Hot Pebbles (roast potatoes)
Moose Moss (salad)
Praries of Prax (cole slaw)
Big V, little v what begins with V? (veggies)
Schlotts Knots (rolls)

Drinks and Dessert:
Pink Ink Yink Drink (pink lemonade)
Bezzelnut Splash (sangria)
Valley of Vung Chocolate Rock Blocks (brownie bites)
Yertle's Turtles (turtle candies)
Thing 1 and Thing 2 cupcakes (red velvet with blue cream cheese frosting)
(If you want to know what stories these items came from just email me)

Horton's Field of Clover cupcakes (strawberry cupcakes with hot pink buttercream frosting)
For the cupcake wrappers I used red papers for the Thing 1 and used a round avery label to make the label and for Horton I used grass cupcake wrappers.

I made all of the food labels using Avery tent cards. 

Invitations and Decorations:

I made the invites by printing the wording out on white card stock and them layering it on red card stock. 

Most of the decorations came from Michael's.  I bought almost one of everything they had, including a 5 foot tall Cat in the Hat.  I also used all of the Dr. Seuss books that we had and hung streamers.  The centerpieces were Dr. Seuss pinwheel kits from Michaels and the pinwheels served as flowers and then I used pipe cleaners and pompoms for filler.  All of the gifts were put on a sled being pulled by a little brown dog (from The Grinch).  I made napkin rings with all of the different Dr. Seuss characters and used red napkins with light blue cutlery.





I made Liam a shirt that says "I am 2" and used the "Grinched" font as the template.



All in all, I think the party was a huge success.  I hope you like the idea and it inspires some of you.

Lindsay