Footrest

Our old armchair is getting worn, so I went online and bought some fabric from Jo-Ann.com. It was a little bit of a gamble, because I didn't bother to get a swatch first, but I like the new fabric well enough.

I started by removing the footrest. It was attached on the underside with screws. The fabric was attached with staples, which made removing the old fabric fairly easy also. The old fabric was really dirty, as well as being worn. I had not thought about how much dirt can accumulate over the course of 25 years!

I used the old fabric to measure the new piece and stapled it on. For the back, I used a piece of cheap quilting cotton that I had lying around. No one will see the back, and this fabric is better quality than the cambric that was there before.

You can really see the contrast between old and new when you look at the footrest from a sitter's position.

Done for now! I'll tackle the little board between the seat and the footrest next.

The cardboard stool is complete!

I finally finished my second cardboard stool about a week ago. I forgot it in my car the day I brought it to work, so I sent one of the older kids out to the car to get it. My boss let him do it, then took my car keys from him. I spent the afternoon wondering how much trouble I was in, but the boss simply wanted to tell me a story: apparently, someone had given a youngster permission to get something from their truck several years ago. That young man "drove to Boston, where he played bumper cars with five other cars before he was caught." I'm really glad the youngster I chose was more responsible than that!

Here is my stool in its final permutation:

In the last picture, I was going for a shot of the large table, which needs either replacement or repair. I noticed the stool in the background, and thought I'd include it. The stool is the perfect size to fit a smaller youngster at the small table in this picture.

ceramics

Last week, I took my first wheel-throwing class at Assabet After Dark. We started with cylinders, which I found a little challenging. I kept wanting to make them taller than they were inclined to be. The clay would fight me, or I would end up a little off-center, or the cylinder would become a bowl as soon as I looked up. I probably leaned a little, pulling the sides off center as I went.

Somehow, cylinders don't feel finished to me, so it was a relief last night to find that we were to work on bowls instead. It was no surprise that we needed to make a cylinder to end up with a bowl, but it was really nice not to have to stop at a cylinder. I made four bowls, some of them very nice ones, if I may say so myself. I would like to have more pictures, but my hands got pretty messy, so here is what I have: