Over the last two weeks, in between sewing projects, I’ve been working on re-upholstering my sweetie’s Grandmother’s rocking chair. It used to live in the family lake house on Lake Mille Lacs in central Minnesota. Her sons used to push her around the ice covered lake in this chair in the winter–doesn’t that paint an interesting picture?!

These are the before photos (above) showing the chair in what it was recovered in in the late 1970s/early 1980s (I’m guessing by the fabric that was used). My sweetie’s Mom recovered it at the time, and it lived a few decades in her family room before be passed down to her son last year.

So we tore it apart, down to the skeleton…

Love this “fix” his Mom added, that is lawn chair webbing strips used to hold in the styrofoam that was used to form the back….

And, then sweetie and I went shopping for fabric…revealing just how different our tastes in decorating are (it’s dangerous to find a guy who actually has an “opinion” on these matters…sometimes it’s best if they just don’t care!). I wanted to recover it in a traditional-contemporary print, something like this sofa…or this… But he wanted it to look more like it did when Grandma had it (a dark royal blue “suede-y” fabric. Yikes!). Well, she was his grandmother… so this is the compromise we came up…

It’s not exactly Anna Maria Horner or Amy Butler home dec…but it doesn’t stand out like a sore thumb and blends in with the rest of what I have…

The stripe is a dark blue (so he’s happy) and also has greens and golds in it (so I’m happy).

It’s trimmed in a gold braiding that really sets off the stripe…


And…it’s a million times better than the “before” model…. ;->