Amber’s Little Blue Trashy Treasure

Last Saturday my friend Jenni and I went to a little Lincoln treasure called Simply Bungalow to check out a special Vintage Vagabond Sale they were having in their back parking lot. (https://www.facebook.com/simplybungalow)  It was freezing (literally!) but we still had fun roaming the aisles and finding a few treasures to take home for ourselves.  My personal favorite find was a little blue step-up chair for $8. I didn’t take a picture of it at the time of purchase.  It almost looked like this.  Just imagine the silver metal parts being covered with a 50 year old vinyl covering that had been painted over to match the blue chippy paint on the rest of the chair.  I thought it was a fun color and would be a great piece to pull out the little steps to display items at my next craft fair.  I wasn’t sure if I would keep the vinyl or maybe put a different fabric on it at some point.

When I got it home, I studied the vinyl a little closer and saw some curious cracks in it, so I decided to do a little minor surgery with it.  I took my exact knife and sliced a tiny slit  to take a little peek to see what the inside shape might be.  And then it happened….The pee mildew 50-year old  funk smell started to escape from its vinyl prison and almost knocked me over.  The smell was slowly leaking into my dining room and kitchen and I had to act fast.  (This is why I unfortunately don’t have any pictures of this.) I grabbed the trash can and a pair of gloves and started ripping off the vinyl and soiled batting as fast as I could.  Then came out the big guns:  disinfectant and a Magic Eraser.  After a good bit of scrubbing I could begin to see the plain metal seat again.  I opened the front door and let in the frigid Nebraska cold front which helped to dissipate most of the horridness of whatever had been percolating under that vinyl for 50 years.  There was no turning back now.  I had to figure out how to recover this little beauty now that the nastiness had been ripped from her.  After a quick trip to Joann’s Fabric Store I had a fun fabric to begin this recovering adventure with.

Sunday, I enlisted some help from little #1.  Since the sunshine made us feel like it wasn’t 40 degrees outside, we took the chair out on our porch and gave it a good steel wool scrub down.  (See how those little steps pull out!…my boys LOVE this feature!)

Then I rummaged through the random fabric pile and found some felt that I thought I could use to make a rough pattern for the chair.The chair back had these handy little pokey things on the back which made it super easy to just wrap the batting  & fabric around and secure.  The same little pokey things were on the underside of the seat, but as I looked at the bottom, some of the metal brackets were rusted and if I tried to force the seat out to recover it, I was pretty sure I would destroy it in the process.  So, plan B….make a little cushion that ties onto the seat posts and maybe has a little covering that hangs down to cover the bare silver metal.The chair back came together pretty fast.  The seat was a little more tricky, but after about an hour of figuring out how I would make it and tearing open an old un-used pillow for a little batting, I came up with what I would consider a pretty cute solution.  So, there she is folks:  My Little Blue Trashy Treasure.  She makes me smile every time I see her sitting in the corner of my dining room.

My little blue trashy treasure