The Universe Hands Me a Gift - the Lamp and the Green Chair, Revisited

I love the way the universe works sometimes.  Last week, I was trying to figure out what I could use to make the shade for the side table lamp.  I had a couple of ideas, but I wasn’t convinced they’d be the right size.  That night, I went home, and in the mail was an envelope from a company that sells promo pens and other tchotchkes.  In the envelope, besides a sample pen, there was this:

I have no idea what it is.  Some kind of blister pack?  Packing material?  Whatever it is, it has little dimples or half spheres (the ones on top of the hexagons) the exact right shape and size for the lamp shade!  And what’s more, there are several of them, which gave me a chance to experiment, because we all know I am never happy with my first try.  😊

I carefully cut out one of the dimples, punched a hole in the top with my leather punch, and glued on a snippet from one of the plastic tubes that comes around the bristles of my fingernail brushes. 

Then I painted it with glossy green Testor’s paint (with a smidgen of black thrown in).  For the base, I painted a bead with a mix of green, yellow, black and white.  (Yes, this is actually the second try on the lamp shade, as the first one had some issues.)

I added a bead cap and a little spacer, as well as a bit of metal tubing, for the neck of the lamp.  To hold the shade in place, I like to use clear vinyl furniture disks.  They come in a standard ¾” diameter, which was a little large for this shade, so I cut it down.  It cuts fairly easily with scissors.  My cuts are not the cleanest, but they really don’t have to be for this purpose. 

I punched a hole in its center, once again using my leather punch.  (I love that tool.)  Naturally, I am out of grain of rice bulbs, so have some on order.  This is the lamp assembly, sans bulb.  The wires will go down through the center, and the bulb will sit on top of the vinyl disk.

The shade then fits over the disk (it's not glued in place yet, as I'm waiting for the bulb), and there we have it.

Last Monday, the fabric for my chair arrived, and I dived into dying it.  Because it is 100% polyester, I had to use Rit DyeMore.  Unfortunately, that doesn’t come in as many colors as original Rit, and there aren’t as many color formulas.  The frustrating thing about looking at colors online is that they aren’t always true to life.  They can also vary greatly from monitor to monitor.  I was shocked when I was looking at pictures of my trial chairs on my monitor at home to see how blue the middle chair looked!  In real life, the suede paper is not a bluish green at all; it is a soft gray green.  (If it showed up as blue green on your monitor, you must have thought I was smoking something when I said it was close to the original chair!)  I’m not entirely sure what the true color of the original chair actually is, and trying to match it to a possible dye combination shade is even trickier.  I finally decided on Apple Green, and picked up bottles of Peacock Green and Sandstone from my local Joann’s.  With DyeMore, you must use the stovetop method of dyeing, which means stirring the fabric in a simmering pot for 30 minutes.  While that was something of a pain, I have to say, the dye took well.  Clean up was a snap.  You’re supposed to wash the fabric with an old towel after dying so that any dye that comes off in the wash will get deposited on the towel.  Apparently, no dye came off at all.  Of course, what I ended up with was nothing like what I saw on my monitor.  I thought my first try (on the right) was a little too intense and lime green, so I tried again, backing off the amount of dye slightly and reducing the Sandstone color a bit relative to the Peacock Green.  I really thought the color on the left was the best, until I started cutting it up into little bits to upholster the chair.  Then, the color on the left looked way too soft and minty, and I preferred my original Apple Green, which is what I ultimately used.

To make the suede buttons and the backing for the chair, I decided to print some of the green color on my white suede paper.  Fortunately, I tested on plain paper first because (you guessed it) the Apple Green color block from the Rit Dye site, when printed out, didn’t match my fabric at all.  I had to play with the color until I got something that I thought was a close enough match to the fabric, then printed a block onto my suede paper.  Whew!

When gluing upholstery fabric to anything that will be curved, I’ve found that it’s best to have the piece in its curved state while gluing.  If I glue the fabric to a flat piece and then try to curve it, I end up with a bunch of excess fabric in the middle.  I put a little glue stick on my foam, stuck the fabric to it, then curved the whole thing around a lip balm stick, holding it in place with a rubber band.  Then I clipped my fabric and glued it down.  I do not clip too close to the edge.  The fabric has to fit over the foam before being glued down on the back.

Usually, tacky glue works great for gluing upholstery.  However, with this fabric, I had to use Fabric Tack.  It just wasn’t staying well with regular glue.

With the seat and the back upholstered and stitches made for the tufting, I glued them in place and added tiny punched dots of the suede, rounded on my craft foam, as buttons. (See here for the process, except I didn’t have to glue anything to paper.) I also used the suede paper on the back.  It lies nice and flat, and I don’t have to worry about fraying on the edges.  The original chair had some kind of white trim.  I used white DMC perle cotton embroidery floss for this.

And here, finally, is the completed chair. 

The Side Table

While waiting for the fabric for the green chair to arrive, I got started on the side table next to the leather chair.

This is the original:

My pattern included strip wood and carved toothpicks, as well as floral wire and seed beads.

The most important part of the table, to me, was its barley twist legs (also known as rope twist).  I previewed my first effort at those in my last post.  Here it is again.

Yes, I’m aware the twist is going the opposite direction.  As it turns out, it was much easier for me to twist it this direction, since I’m right handed. 

I found two tutorials online:  https://www.thesprucecrafts.com/make-carved-miniature-rope-mouldings-2366807 and https://petitpunt.blogspot.com/2009/08/making-rope-twisted-legs.html.  The second one was enormously helpful, even though the author was clearly working with a larger scale.  (If I had made my initial cuts 2 mm deep, I would have cut right through the toothpick!)  I particularly liked the jig for holding the wood while cutting.  To make my own, I just glued two cut-off bamboo skewers side by side on a piece of scrap wood.  It worked perfectly! The tools I ended up using were the jig, my utility knife, a triangular file and a round file from my set of mini files, a fine grit sanding twig, and, of course, a ruler and pencil.

I cut off the ends of my fancy toothpicks, because they were a bit longer and a bit more consistent than my regular round toothpicks.  Round toothpicks often aren’t really round.  Even in the picture below, you can see that there is some flatness to parts of the sides.  I drew vertical lines 180 degrees apart down the sides, then marked horizontal lines all the way around the toothpick at 2 mm intervals.

I then drew my diagonal lines across each “box” formed by the two sets of lines.

I made my first set of cuts around the toothpick with my utility knife, following my diagonals down.  There are actually two sets of winding cuts—one starting in the top “box” of the left-hand side of the toothpick, one starting in the top “box” on the right-hand side.

I then widened the cuts with one edge of my triangular file.

I widened them further with my round file.

Finally, I softened the edges of my cuts with my sanding twig.

The whole process took about 45 minutes per toothpick.  The fussiest part was marking the lines.  After that, it was kind of fun.

Before assembling my table, I cut, stained, and varnished my legs, shelf and tabletop assembly.  The tabletop assembly was also glued before varnishing. The top of the table has been veneered with some of the maple I got from Carrie, as it takes the stain better than basswood and has a lovely smooth surface when varnished.

I then drilled tiny holes in the end of each piece of barley twist leg, as well as in the bottom four corners of the tabletop base and through the four corners of the shelf.  I glued small pieces of fine wire in the ends of each leg.  I used this wire to strengthen the connections between the component parts.  The bottoms of the legs are made with metal seed beads (in matte copper) and toothpick tips. The wire runs down through the shelf and the seed beads. The “wood” decoration is made from floral wire and more of the metal beads.  Of course, I was so intent on construction, I forgot to take pictures of the process, but here it is completed.

I’ve added some over-sized books and a lovely laser cut doily from Stewart Dollhouse Creations.

Is it just me, or does the base of the real-life lamp look exactly like it was made from a bead and a bead cap? 😃 This is where I intended to put the lamp whose shade I broke, but now I’m thinking I should just make my own.  Either way, I have to come up with some way of making a shade like that.  I wish they made ping pong balls that were half an inch in diameter.

The room box so far.  It’s slowly taking shape.

The Saga of the Green Chair

I’ve started work on the green chair.  Here are a couple of pictures of the original.

For my pattern in Word, I had to use a bunch of different shapes and combine them in an effort to create something that was pretty close to the shape of the real-life chair.

I grouped the various shapes, copied them into Microsoft Paint, erased the lines I didn’t need, then copied them back into Word.  As you can see, I originally had the bottom of the back as a straight line.  Fortunately, I made up the chair using mat board first.  It quickly became apparent that the back was too “stiff” looking.  Finally, it dawned on me that in order to get the chair back at a nice angle, I had to curve the bottom of the back pattern, too.  After a bit more experimenting, I got a fit I liked.  Here you can see my mat board chair, the patterns, and the wood pieces I cut.  I don’t have a laser cutter, so everything is done by hand using a utility knife.  To get the nice curve on the back, I soaked the wood in boiling water, then wrapped it around a small glue stick, secured it with rubber bands, and left it to dry overnight.

Here is the finished frame of the chair.  Keep in mind that the seat will be higher once the cushion is on.  I didn’t bother staining most of it, since it will be covered with upholstery.  I am definitely happier with the way the back looks.

Then I tried upholstering cushions for it.  Ugh!  Since the chair is upholstered in velvet, I had ordered a bunch of velvet swatches from Mood.  The swatch I tried was closest in color, although really too yellow to be a good match.  I thought it was a fairly low nap velvet, but in half scale it definitely looks . . . hairy.  I guess I forgot that I’ve used velvet to simulate fur in half scale.  Next I tried some velvet paper.  It has a nice texture.  The color still isn’t quite right, but I think it’s a bit closer.  Here I ran into two problems:  I couldn’t make the indentations for the tufting using thread—there wasn’t enough give in the paper.  I tried using my burnishing tool to make the indentations.  It worked, kind of, but not well.  The other problem was that the paper was too thick and too stiff to wrap nicely around the foam cushion.  For my third try, I used some Alova suede; I’d picked up a remnant at Joann’s, and thought it was worth a try, even though the color is way too dark.  I honestly think this fabric works the best.  (It looks better in real life than in extreme close-up).  It wraps and tufts nicely, and the nap isn’t too long. 

I looked online for other color choices, but they only have a neon lime green and very yellowish sage green.  They do, however, have a plain white.  I have ordered a yard of the white, and I’m going to try my hand at dyeing it.  We’ll see how it goes.

In other news, I completed a little rug to go under the leather chair.  This is actually a 1:48 scale rug pattern.  I worked it in continental/tent stitch on 40-count linen.  This made up much, much faster than cross-stitch, because it’s basically half the stitches.

I also tried working on the barley twist/rope twist for the legs of the side table.  Here is an example, before and after staining.  I’m pretty pleased with the result.  Will talk more about the process in my next post.

And, finally, on a completely different note, Carrie was kind of enough to send me some left-over wood veneer that she had. (Some of it is being used on the side table.)  As an extra little surprise, she threw in an etched metal sheet of 1:24 scale silverware and utensils.  I've already made up the little corkscrew/bottle opener, and here it is on the bar from my Merrimack.  Thanks, Carrie!