Peacock Chair

At last - I've finished this. Well almost. I haven't actually attached the feet (for the second time) as I only have 3 of the beads I want to use - so I need to make sure I can get a fourth before I go sticking them on.

Here's a picture of it as it is:

And here is it pretending to have feet:

And a close up of the feet I'm going to (hopefully) use:

I had attached using the canoe clips the ones that came with the chair, but when I came to assemble the chair and glued the base to the seat box I discovered that the canoe clips put big bends in the base and I really didn't like how it looked, and the feet looked a bit big too. So I managed to get the beads off and the canoe clips out without damaging the chair too much and then found some other beads that I'll just glue on.

And here's a view of the back:

Now we come to my construction problems. In the next two photos you'll notice that I've used fatter wadding on the front of the seat back than is probably called for - you can see the difference in thickness of wadding between the front and the back of the seat back - I used a thin batting (much more like what is expected I think) on the back, the sides and the drawer front. This has had the result of pushing the back out and so the arms don't meet the back (second pair of photos). I did try to use thread to pull them together, but the gap was big enough that the thread just looked messy across the gap. So I took it out and left it.

In the second photo you'll notice that the seat is very padded too - I used two layers of the thick wadding on this - after all if I have an armchair I want it to be comfortable. This made it quite difficult to get the armrolls in properly. I sewed them in rather than glueing them and the first one I had attached the seat cushion to the box, and then sewed it first to the cushion and then to the side. That resulted in some not as neat as it should be seam (and I'm not terribly happy with it, but given it's also glued I can't do anything about it), so on the other side I attached the armroll to the side, and then sewed it to the cushion and then glued down the side. This resulted in a much neater finish.

I then had to sew the base to the side to pull in the gap that was there. Then I sewed the base of the back to the base of the chair, then glued it and then sewed up the sides.

I'm also not entirely happy with the gap that shows in the drawer. I think perhaps I should have cut the craft board from the flaps and just used the coloured card as flaps to get rid of some of the bulk there. I'm not quite sure how I could have reduced the buckling of the cardboard to close the drawer properly without sewing it closed.

Mum and I decided that next time (Mum has one to do too so I think she'll be the next time as I doubt I'll be doing it again in a hurry) it would be better to sew the cushion, base, sides and armrolls into a rectangle (and possibly put the back on too), and then insert the cardboard box into the hole. That would hopefully make it all a little bit neater, and reduce crooked gluing making problems.

Anyway - over all I'm pleased with it - I just keep seeing the bits I could have done better if I'd done it differently.