Another Sew-Free Weekend

This is terrible... at this rate I am never going to finish my jacket on time!

Problem is, I keep getting distracted by other fun projects!  For example, chairs!

I refinished the top of my coffee table and then got started painting the broken chair a high gloss black.  I am happy to report that a) my repair job seems to have taken and b) I really like the high gloss black finish.  So I decided to get started on the rest of the chairs. 

For each chair I began by unscrewing the seat from the wooden frame.  I then washed the chairs down.  This step was sort of disgusting as I had to clean approximately 60 years of accumulated crumbs that had caught between the chair and the cushion.  I then sanded each chair and applied a coat of primer.  After the primer was dry I applied two coats of the black paint.

Next I plan on going over all of them with a very fine grade sandpaper to remove the paintbrush lines and doing a final black coat with the "ultra-smooth" roller.  After that each chair will get a protective clear coat.  I'm hoping that these steps will result in a professional-quality finish and avoid that dreaded happy home crafter look...

Meanwhile I've also been busy pulling thousands of staples out the the chair cushions and removing the horrible old upholstery.  In doing this I discovered that the original cushions were stuffed with straw!  each seat has a solid wooden base which is covered with thick padding of straw.  Then there is batting pulled tight over the straw and the upholstery fabric stapled over that. 

I also picked out purchased my upholstery new upholstery fabric and it should be winging it's way to me any day now...  I bought this medium weight cotton upholstery fabric by Waverly from fabric.com.

I bought smaller amounts of two other prints from the same line to make throw pillows to put on the bench.

Altogether I think this is going to make for a pretty sharp room... now it's just a matter of execution.

In other crafty news, I also decided to take a cue from Not Martha and make some fun Easter suprise eggs.  I want to line some eggs with chocolate and fill them with candy while other eggs will be filled with cake!  To that end, I spent last night hollowing out and dying eggs (after disinfecting by simmering in boiling water of course!). 

My easter project in progress...

I started with three dozen eggs, figuring I'd lose a few along the way... In the hollowing out process I managed to smash only one which I was proud of since I kept dropping them in the sink.  Lesson learned? Egg shells are suprisingly resiliant!