Peacock Chair

And here's a picture of it with feet, completely finished.

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.

Peacock Chair

And halfway through the putting together stage of the chair.

Peacock Chair

Well it's about time I made another post. But my exams are over now, so I've got no more excuses for not keeping this blog more up to date. So here is a picture that is actually about a month old now:

I have cut the pieces out and started assembling the chair. When I first started I realised that I didn't have any sewing cotton the right colour so I made up these little drawers instead:

They are from a little kit that a friend gave me a while ago and they have just been sitting around doing nothing. So I finally got around to making them. I did do them slightly different to the instructions (which were in Japanese so I did quite well really) and made them into two separate pieces. The instructions had them joining so they could fold into a cube with the drawer fronts in the middle. I decided that would be too easily broken - and I'd already glued one of the coloured pieces down in the hinge area before I worked out how they were supposed to go.

I'll take some more photos soon of what I've been doing and post some more updates.

Peacock Chair

Here's where I'm up to:

Note the slight mistake in the next two pictures. I decided not to frog it as the pieces will be cut up and there's no back and front to the fabric, the grain is still in the right direction etc.

Peacock Chair

I've finished the back of the chair:

I changed a few little things - the little q for a big Q, I changed the tail because I kept seeing a cup or shield, and I took off a couple of stitches on the breast of the peacock making it look a little less female.

And I've started on the fob:

I've used the initials that I used for the CA Wells Cottage Etui as they fitted in the space nicely.

Peacock Chair

I have started another new design - the Peacock Stitching Chair from The Cat's Whiskers. This photo is a couple of days old, so I have now also finished all the basting (along the pin lines in the photo) and completed stitching half of my first letter. My fabric wasn't quite as large as recommended but with some careful juggling of the pins I managed to get all the pieces on there with enough room to finish it.