Inexplicable ambitions « Dana Laventure : Photography

Lemon Found

August 5, 2008

My Chair.

It’s only in the past year that I’ve finally begun to understand my dad’s love of onions; even now my appreciation is fairly limited to “the red ones.” We’ve always had other things in common, though: A love of languages, for example, and the inclination to make things by hand. But oh, did it ever embarrass me when he’d pick me up from elementary school and, on the five minute ride home, repeatedly toe the brakes to get a better look at… the furniture someone else was throwing out on the curb.

I always thought he could read my chagrin through the way I slumped down in my seat, ideally finding myself beneath the windowsill and thus neatly out of sight. I had a (perhaps irrational) fear that another family, or worse, the neighbor who had decided where the furniture belonged, might see him get out of his car and pick it up. (With his love of fixing things, I’ve suggested that my mom and I might do better to buy him broken things for his birthday than anything new.) Recently, I mentioned those childhood days to him. It turned out he had been oblivious to my abashment all along, and while he wasn’t sorry, he seemed to understand why a little girl might think it less than enjoyable to watch her father go through trash.

So he had some right to mock me yesterday when I told him how on my way home, I’d happened to pass the site of a garage sale I had missed attending the previous day, found it miraculously turned into a “FREE STUFF” pile by the passage of a night, stopped my car, got out, and forced into the backseat a simply beautiful wrought-iron chair, painted white.

This is the chair, as depicted by my lovely cell phone. Images taken with my Pentax are... still chillin' in the Pentax's memory card for the time being, but they're on their way!

Another view of the chair, this time as depicted by my lovely cell phone.

(And he did.)

But I love this chair! I think it’s pretty. (Pretty what, you might say? Pretty rusty! Ba-doom chik.) And with my dad’s help, I’ve hooked up a drill with a wire brush attachment, and begun the process of power-sanding (I guess that’s what you’d call it) until the rust and loose paint began to flake off, revealing a solid deep gray color beneath.

I should also mention the sign: “SHABBY CHIC CHAIR $12 / JUST ADD A CUSHION!”

Add a cushion indeed. The seat, as you may be able to see (by the way I wedged the sign into the part I wanted to emphasize), includes a rather pointy slit down the middle. Also notice the disconnect between framework and latticework around the top right edge. Not sure how that happens to wrought iron except with some considerable force, but I’m not above using considerable force to repair it! This may involve enlisting the help of my friend Britt’s father, who’s got welding tools.

So, y’know. I’m working on it. It appeals to all my modern-day Rococo, Francesca Lia Block-like dreams. (The first link is to a post from the blog of Penelope Bat, whose wordiness and otherworldliness both quite enjoyable. The second is to the bio of author Francesca Lia Block, a writer of California-flavored fairy tales, alternately angsty and magical, of which every 13-year-old girl should be aware.)

So far, the poor chair may end up in one of the following states:

lime green (my original idea, and the simplest to boot, from which all the following ideas later sprang)
partially plushified with floral fabrics (oh yes, this is going to be an indoor chair if it kills me, complete with little felt pads under its feet)
wrapped in multicolored yarn (my friend Melissa suggested something like this yarn by Cherry Tree Hill Supersock Potluck, when I expressed my anxieties over the anticipated difficulties of using fabric)
re-painted white, and then detailed with painted vines, leaves, and flowers (kudos to Brittany for this one)

It may be off the beaten path of photography, and erring instead towards the long road of home repair (note my disinclination to carry my camera within ten feet of the power sander), but I’m excited, aren’t you?

Posted by Dana