Join us at Coloradolady's blog for Vintage Thingie Thursday!!
I'd like to introduce you to a dear family heirloom: this is The Stool.
In the early 1950s, in Burns, Oregon, my grandpa George Bradley made this stool for his new bride, Betty Kiggins Bradley. The top was plain wood colored and the legs were painted a bright red and then a rust red color. When my mom left home (Gresham, Oregon---I think) in the early 1970s, Grandma Betty gave her this stool as she had no furniture!
Mom kept this with her when she married my dad. She painted it chocolate brown and did a little repair work:
It has served all kinds of purposes since! I can remember it as a plant stand in the living room and a night table in pretty much every family member's bedroom! When my husband and I were married in Baker City, Oregon in 1998, guess what I inherited!!
The stool! Don't get me wrong, this really is one of the most special things I own. How awesome to have such a portable little heirloom! Throughout the years that I've owned it, I've had plans on fixing it up, repainting it, just adding my own flavor to it.
The past couple of years, I've really been wanting to "get crafty" so I've bought up lots and lots of supplies. But...haven't taken the time to use any of them! Lately, I've had the time to do the crafty stuff so I've been trying to come up with projects to do that don't require me to go buy anything else! So...last night, I decided to grab The Stool out of the shed and see what I could do to get it looking presentable.
I brought it in and set it on the kitchen floor, telling Selah that I was planning to fix it up cute. She put her baby blanket on it and said she thought that was pretty cute.
It was...but not quite what I had in mind! I wanted to try and take the paint off but, since I was only using the things I had around the house, I had to improvise. I used my Pampered Chef spatula to begin scraping off the top.
That lasted about 5 minutes and I was sick of it so I decided just to paint over the 3 other layers of paint and hope that it would crackle neat!
It did!! By the way, I tried and tried to pry that nail out of there but it wouldn't budge. I kinda like leaving it there though as my mom put it there and it's kind of been a little joke over the years! I needed to find some way to cover it though!
After a couple coats of paint, I decided to stop for the night and consider options for the next step.
This morning, I remembered that I had several yards of some pretty fabric that my friend JoAnn gave me at church last month. I decided to make a cute cushion for the top. Using my 8-year-old Michael's school ruler, I measured out a circle that I hoped would fit!
I've never made a cushion before so I wasn't really sure what to do---when suddenly, I remembered a Christmas craft project that we did in the 5th grade! Mrs. Neyman taught us how to make mini-pillows and string them together for wreath ornaments.
I stitched all the way around the circle...Avalon helped, of course!
Then I filled it loosely with pillow filling.
Once I set the cushion on the stool, I realized that The Nail was still very obvious. So, I hot glued eyelet trim all around the top and then glued the pillow on.
Not bad for a 21st century makeover! So, Mom, you want it back now??
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