Slumming with my daughter

In the middle of Feb. I took a week and went to visit my daughter. Her hubby was on a work retreat in Mexico and she didn't really want to be a single parent for the week with a almost 3 yo and a 3 month old infant. She didn't want to take a baby to Mexico.

She also had some really challenging things going on with close friends that she felt she needed to stick around for.

So, what did we do? We knitted and crocheted, we did a little shopping, we went to lunch, we reupholstered a child's rocking chair, we ate, we cooked, we had Indian food, and we watched Jane Austen movies and Braveheart. We also stayed up real late every night. It was great fun.
I am impressed by my daughter's patience with her kids, especially the baby, who is struggling with nursing issues. I am impressed with how well organized she is and I am impressed with all the friends she has. I'm also impressed with how well she gets around her California area, which is very busy. Meghan, you go girl!

When I first arrived, we were discussing our plans for the week, and she pulled out her daughter's little upholstered rocking chair and the fabric she had bought some time previously that she was going to reupholster it with. So I said, "why don't we do it this week?" "Really?". Why not? I had done reupholstering on a sofa, way back when, and I knew this little chair couldn't be that difficult.
So we set to work pulling off the old upholstery, which was a fuzzy brown striped cordoroy fabric to use for patterns for the new pieces. It took some work wrestling out all those little staples holding the fabric on. Then we realized we would have to take the seat back off in order to get all the old fabric off and put some of the new on. We finally got it all off. The old fabric was old, dirty and grody. We couldn't believe that our sweet little Reesey had been sitting on it. EEEEEWWWWW!

We then set to work cutting the new fabric using the old pieces as patterns. Cibo, their large yellow lab, kept wanting to lay down on the fabric because it was taking up most of the living room rug. That's all we needed, dog hair all over the place. After the pieces were cut, we started putting them on the chair. It actually went faster than we thought it would, but it would have gone faster if we had not made so many mistakes. We had gotten the front, the arms and the seat pad fabric on and were about ready to reattach the seat back when we realized it didn't fit. That's when we realized we had put the seat pad foam in the wrong way. Fortunately, after studying the chair for a minute, we realized we could just unstaple the fabric at the back of the cushion, pull it out, turn it around and stuff it back in. Whew! We made a few other easily correctable errors before we were done, but it looks so good now and we are so proud of ourselves. We just wish we had thought to take before and after pictures and pix of the entire process. I do have a picture of the final outcome and Reese enjoying her new chair.





Doesn't it look great? We are so good!