Five Dollar Flower Chair

I have had good garage sale luck the past few weekends.  People are pricing items to sell, rather than to make a profit or recoup losses.  This small chair set me back two bucks.  A group of houses on one block had a sale. I only needed to go to the first house to spend all of my money.  The man had only managed to clean out half of his attic -- lucky for me this  little treasure was in the first round.

This is part of the box from the freezer chest we bought a few months back.  It makes an excellent spray paint box.  The bright blue garbage pick project I posted about a short while back was painted using this.  Whenever you buy something big that comes in a box, don't toss the box.  Save it for when you need to spray paint!

I used a cheap can of white paint which I think was three bucks.  The seat was recovered using a piece of fabric cut out of a discarded table cloth.  This is the same table cloth I used to make an apron last month.  While it looked fine painted white, it just seemed too plain to me.  I'm a "more is more" kind of girl!

Here is what I ended up with.  I went for a shabby-chic kind of look and picked a light coat of a magenta-based pink for the rose and a really pale green for the leaves.  This mimics the pattern in the fabric.  Since the spray coat was so thin, I gave it a once over with a layer of white acrylic paint after I'd painted the rose.  The entire surface then got a thin coat of polycrylic.  I had the fabric, acrylic paint and poly on hand, so I didn't figure that into my five dollar project price.  Even if I did, it was only about ten cents more worth of material.

Some of the white shows through in places on purpose. I didn't want this to look new.  It's not a new piece by any means.  My guess is it's about forty or fifty years old.  I picked it up as a small gift for a friend's little girl.  They just bought a new house and don't have the funds to furnish it.  The little girl is now beginning to walk and will soon be big enough to use this chair.  When she gets bigger, she can use it for a doll or stuffed animal.

I mixed the paler magenta for the rose based on the flower towards the front of the seat.  The pattern is very muted and indistinct, which is why I went with a thin pale coating, showing through with some white.

I have another painting project going for this little lady -- but it's very involved. It was serendipity that I found a small piece that I could refinish in a weekend. The price and the piece were right!