Creative Day 3: A Finished Chair

We have First Friday Family Dinners every month.  It is a big event, so even when a number of people aren't able to make it on a particular month, we still have about 18 people in the house.  It's a bit crowded, but we like it.  Of course hosting a big family dinner means that my Crazy starts to show.  Even though I know that I will spend half of the next day cleaning up after the dinner, I still put in a full day's work to get ready.  This includes cleaning, making sure the yard looks decent (What if people walked outside and saw the weeds?!?), and making enough food to feed an army.  It's just once a month, so it's worth it.

But that does mean that I don't have much time for anything like crafting.  I did, however, decide that I needed to do something creative as part of Thirty Creative Days.  I also knew that I needed more chairs for dinner and the chair that I've been working on for a month looked awful, too embarrassing to use.

I bought this chair at a thrift store for about $3.  It was one of those horrible little kitchen dining chairs from a decade or two ago -- white trim with a pine seat, made even uglier by the chipping paint and the grime on the wood.  My original plan was to spray paint it and then weave paper together and mod podge it to the seat.  The paper weaving looked good...until I tried to put it on the chair.  Disaster!  I ripped it up and started again.

My second plan was to paint designs on the seat.  Everything I tried just didn't turn out and eventually it looks like a child used blue finger paints to ruin mother's dining set.

When in doubt, when all else fails, there's my standard go-to: chalkboard paint.

Honey and The Teenager weren't impressed, pointing out that no one wants to sit on a chair with chalk.  I said no worries -- kids would like it.  And at least we ended up with enough chairs for dinner.