My (ex) sister in law Jill (and her boyfriend) have been helping me with this little art/furniture project for my yard. Our dining area in our kitchen is TINY and we can only seat 3 people at our table so I really wanted a bigger table that I could leave outdoors for dinner parties and/or just to have some more space for eating outside during great weather. Jill is quite the "picker" and scours Craig's List, and garage sales, like nobody else I know and can always find the most amazing "treasures." Actually, they aren't even close to being treasures when she finds them. Instead, she has this innate ability to find run down, beat up, practically destroyed pieces of furniture and turn them into AMAZING pieces. She strips them down, fixes them up, primes and paints them and BAM! Gorgeousness!
So, when I told her what I was looking for, she found the most insanely cool table for me on Craig's List. First, I absolutely love the oval shape of the table, which is somewhat unusual. The chairs have these great curves and that awesome X back. And the underside of the table is incredibly unique with a "leg" design I've never seen before. She just knew it was "me" and she was totally right!
She then spent the next several weeks sanding and priming and painting the table with an indoor/outdoor paint finish. We decided to make the chairs black and the table red. My intention with the set was to steal my friend Agnes's creative genius and use French Comics decoupaged and Mod Podged onto the chairs. So, Agnes generously sent me a stack of french comics which we sat through and cut out anything that grabbed our attention. Then, we started to see some themes emerging and decided to do one theme per chair!
The first chair is a pin up/boudoir type chair, what we affectionately call The Sexy Chair. The second chair is a Nautical theme. The third chair is a Noir theme. And the fourth chair is the kid chair with fun, kid friendly comics on it. I Realize that some folks are going to object to my use of some rather risquee comics for something my children are going to be sitting their bottoms on but hey, I'm French. We're pretty comfortable with these themes and my kids are too and it's just not a big deal in my house. I was raised with this stuff and I turned out just fine. And I'm choosing to raise my children with the same European sensibility to such matters as I was raised with. Quite honestly, my kids didn't even do a double take when they saw the chairs. They loved all 4 of them and pointed to their favorite images on each chair without batting an eye.
I'm going to first attach two pictures Jill took as she was working on the table and chairs. We don't have a good BEFORE image because the craig's list photo is dreadful and you can't even see anything. Just know that the table and chairs, while solid hard wood, were in AWFUL condition and what Jill did with them is nothing short of miraculous!
Then, I'll attach a collage of point and shoot pictures I took this afternoon of the finished product! I just LOVE it and am terribly depressed that it's too cold and dark oustide for us to eat dinner out there on the table! Lunch on the weekends though!!! :)
SO, this is what Jill and I have been working on! So glad it's all done. She spent an ENTIRE day over at my house working on the decoupage/mod podging with me one day and even worked on it alone when I had to leave to pick up the kids from school! Now THAT is dedication!!!
This was a really fun project and I can't wait to get started on my next endeavour! I have a bunch of ideas of things I want to do... No time right now but come January I'll be bursting at the seams with ideas!!!!
Drumroll.......
