This is admittedly one of my most bizarre furniture projects. This chair was the last of a dining set that stood outside a junk shop week after week. People had bought the chairs off in sets of twos and fours, and this odd chair was the lonely lad that was left. Fine by me; I had plans for a purposefully mismatched dining set. And home it came.

 

When I bought it, this 30s/40s chair (like each of its brothers and sisters) was covered in fire engine orange-red paint. I started out by thinking I could give the chair a little dignity. So I used StripEase to remove the paint and I stained it in Miniwax Jacobean. Then it sat. There were too many decisions to make.

 

What kind of seat to do? What sort of fabric had it originally been covered in? And the longer I looked at it, the more I kept looking at that arch in the back panel. It reminded me of something. It reminded me of an illustration from a Maxfield Parrish calendar I’d kept.

 

So, before long, I’d forgotten all about Dignity for the chair. I used the image from the Maxfield Parrish calendar and decoupaged it onto the chair back. I liked how the checkerboard floor in the print seemed to extend outward. So I decided to do the seat the same way, as if the floor were continuing along the seat. I bought a roll of plain unstretched artist’s canvas and some fiberfill, and I used a staple-gun to affix the new cushion to the seat. I screwed the whole seat back onto the chair. Then I roughly gauged and marked out, in sticky painter’s tape, a row of squares at a time, the angle of the floor tiles on the cushion, as if they reached beyond the frame of the print. I painted them in with black craft paint. Once all the squares were in and dried, I used a bit of leftover coffee to stain them the beige-brown to match the marble look of the floor tiles. I gave the seat a quick spray of clear coating to make it permanent.