Orange Swirl Weekend

Hello again! Did you miss me? No posts since Tuesday, and that's because I actually got busy the rest of the week. Most excitingly, I got called for my first Ohio job interview on Wednesday! It was a great morale booster, a small connection back to the professional world.

On the craft front, I've moved on to another project. Knitting took a back seat this week. After we arrived in Columbus I decided to recover the dining room chairs for a different look (we bought a modern-looking white couch which made the chairs look very out-of-place).

Our dining chairs are quite old, I am told, and have seen several owners in their life. Here is one of them before the chair makeover:

On Thursday and Friday, I spent time stripping the old fabric off and found some interesting things under all the staples:

Some interesting brown corduroy, some light green vinyl...

Some straw (!) and fleecy cottony padding held down with little nails.

I had my upholstery class this morning at Fabric Farm Interiors (dining room slip-seats). This class was a great introduction to simple upholstery. The instructor was incredibly helpful. It was fun, informative, but hard work! The instructor made it look super easy and when I got to practicing, it looked rather...lumpy. Timewise, I did not expect it to take me TWO HOURS to cover two chair seats. Lumpy ones at that. I'm handy, I'm crafty, what the heck? Anyhow, I managed to finish by noon. Lucky for me, the instructor had done my other two seats as class demos. And although the class was only for seats, he was kind enough to write out a step-by-step plan for how to deal with the chair backs too. Fantastic.

I didn't take any pictures during the upholstery class because I didn't want to look silly, so you'll have to live without seeing the new insides.

Anyhow, here is D attaching a seat:

The post-makeover chair. Isn't it pretty? There is something Klimt-esque about this fabric that I really like.

After my class, D and I went to the North Market to pick up some veggies and have a quick lunch. We spotted a fabulous Harvest Pumpkin vest (can you spot it?) in the veggie stand:

D says it made his day.

It's Canadian Thanksgiving on Monday, and in recent years D & I have always enjoyed delicious turkey-fest at his parents place. I think being away from Canada (yes, 6 hours over the border makes all the difference) has me more excited and needy about having a turkey dinner with friends (some sort of identity crisis thing according to D). Happily, we will be having yummy Thankgiving dinner at S & J's tomorrow: a Springfield, Ohio free-range bird with all the fixins. The only thing that is a bit disconcerting is the temperature - it's a humid 90 degrees here, and I'm wearing a sundress with 45 spf sunblock on in October. Something's just not right about that.

Happy turkey weekend!