Read My Chair

Decoupage is such a versatile crafting activity. It really is amazing how a little bit of paper can give new life to old objects. Id seen for sale online some chairs that were decorate with beautiful wrapping paper, but the price tag that came with them was a bit of a shocker. So I thought I could probably do better and for much cheaper!

As normal when I mentioned that I wanted to do this project our boot sale/antique guru Bob had just the thing already in his garage. Granted the seat was missing and it needed a good sanding but with a little tuition on how to fix it I quickly had a fully functioning chair to start working with.

Instead of coving it with wrapping paper (which is often pretty pricy at £1.50 a sheet) I decided that I could make the chair a whole lot more personal by covering it with my favourite books. So I headed off to a boot sale and miraculously in one short hour I found exactly what I was looking for, copies of three of my favourite books. Can you guess which ones from the picture above?

To start, I gave the chair a coating in white emulsion and let it dry completely. I then took to the books and went through them all to select some of my favourite passages and ripped them out. In case you couldn’t tell from the above pictures the books were His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman, Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carol and Harry Potter by JK Rowling.

These books are all favourites for different reasons. As I grew up in Oxfordshire and both His Dark Materials and Alice and Wonderland both have strong ties to the city. I love the way Lyra’s Oxford in Northern Lights is so similar yet so different from one I grew up in. With regards to Harry Potter they really are the books of my generation, I was the same age as Harry when the Philosophers’ Stone came out and so grew up with him.

Once I took out my favourite passages I then ripped up the rest of the books ready to put on the chair. Then all I did was to take a paintbrush and some PVA and start gluing text all over the chair. I saved my favourite passages to go on the top so that they could be read easily. The seat of the chair I covered with some Penguin Book wrapping paper. Once done it was just the case of coating the chair with several layers of varnish.

So there you have it, my "please read my chair". Each time you sit in it you can remember the little bit history that each of the novels brings with it.