Back to School SALE and Gettin' Crafty

It's hard to believe that some of you have already started your school year!  The rest of us will be joining you in just a few short weeks.  Has anyone had any back to school nightmares yet?  OMG!  I usually get them really bad the entire week before school starts.  I have had dreams that it was open house (orientation) and my classroom was completely bare!!  That's definitely a huge worry of mine!  HA!

To help ease your fears of those back to school nightmares, I have a really awesome Back to School B.O.G.O. sale starting now and running through the end of August.  Click on the picture below to begin shopping! :-)

 When you shop at my Teacher's Notebook store, following your purchase, you get to choose any other item for FREE!!  Now that's a great deal!!!  After your purchase, just send me an email (michelle83mcelhinny@gmail.com) with your FREEBIE selection.  Please be sure to include your Teacher's Notebook user name just in case it's different from your email address. Remember, the free item that you choose must be of equal or lesser value than than the highest priced item of your purchase.  You can make as many purchases as you want in the month of August and you will always get to choose that FREE item!! 

GETTIN' CRAFTY

Well, before I left for vacation I was gettin' a little crafty with this boring directors chair that was sitting in my classroom.  I guess I probably should've been packing but I'm a huge procrastinator.  :-)  Oh well!  Read the rest of this post for a tutorial of how I jazzed up my chair and for how you can get crafty with a chair just like this one.

I use this chair in my classroom for writing celebrations and student sharing.  Students even like to sit in it as a special privilege for silent reading.  You can get a directors chair just like this one at Pier 1.  This is what the chair looked like before I began.   

 The first thing I had to do was pull the boring blue fabric off of the chair.  The fabric on the back of the chair just slides right off when you pull it upwards off of the poles.  The bottom part was a little bit tricky.  Once you take the top part off, the arm rests kinda fall down to the sides.  When the sides are down, it exposes a long piece of wood that is wrapped in the fabric for the seat part of the chair.  I just pulled the fabric up and out towards the middle of the chair and wiggled it until the wood pieces came out.  I removed the wood from the fabric and set them both aside.  

The next step was the fun part!  Spray paint!!   I took the bare wooden chair outside (Gavin and Landen tagged along) and placed it on a piece of cardboard in my driveway.  I kept the arm rest leaned down to the sides so I could get inside the crevices really good.  I sprayed every inch of the wood and the metal pieces with pink spray paint.  (I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to spray paint on metal hinges or screw parts...Oh well...I wanted it all PINK!)  So as I'm spraying, my boys think it's fun to experiment to see if a piece of grass would stick to it if they threw it on my FRESHLY PAINTED CHAIR!!!  Goodness!  Boys will definitely enhance a mother's ability to be patient!  After the chair was completely covered in pink, I just dragged the cardboard and chair into my garage so it could dry over night. 

  I went to a craft store (Hobby Lobby) and got just one yard of polka dot fabric.  When I saw it at the store, I just had to have it!  That was the easy part!  I could probably spend an entire day in this store!!  They just have so many great things that teachers get excited over...like this glitter scrapbook paper!!  Gavin actually spotted it because it was SPARKLING!!  I'm not sure I have a use for this yet, but a super fun must have for the future.  Way to go Gav!

Now on to the hard part...the fabric!  I used a seam ripper to take the stitching out of both pieces of fabric, including all of the edges.  This allowed me to lay the blue fabric completely straight.   Keep in mind the stitch points when the fabric is folded and sewed.  You will need to sew the fabric back together in the exact same spots.

I took the polka dot fabric and wrapped it around the blue fabric so I could get an idea of how much polka dot fabric I needed (it's kinda like wrapping a gift).  You want just enough polka dot fabric on the blue fabric but not too much.  I left about 1/2 inch of polka dot fabric around the edge of the blue fabric.  I put the polka dot fabric on my table face down and placed the blue fabric on top (leaving that 1/2 inch of extra polka dot around the edges).  I took some adhesive spray and sprayed the top of the blue fabric and then I folded the polka dot fabric on top of the blue fabric so the colored part of the polka dots was now on the outside.  You're essentially wrapping the blue fabric with the polka dot fabric, just like you would wrap a gift...only it's a lot thinner.  When you have smoothed the polka dot fabric onto the blue fabric, so there's no bubbles or wrinkles, flip it over.

Next, you'll want to use a regular glue stick on the edges of the blue fabric to get the polka dot fabric to stick to the uncovered blue side.  This will allow you to move things around if necessary without getting too sticky with the spray adhesive.  When the 3 sides are folded down onto the exposed blue fabric, you will then spray this side of the blue fabric and smooth the polka dot fabric from the middle to the edges.  You really don't want the edges of this side to stick just yet.  Once you have the middle smoothed out, spray a little more spray adhesive onto all of the edges and tuck under the fabric edges so the frayed part of the fabric is not exposed.  All of the edges should match up and all of the fabric should be tucked under to create a closed seam.  Set aside and do the same thing to the other piece of blue fabric.

On to the sewing!  After the blue fabric is completely covered with polka dots, you will need to sew around the entire piece of fabric to keep all of the edges tucked under.  Repeat to both pieces of fabric.  Then  you will need to sew the sides back together, just like it was at the beginning.  This is where you want to remember the stitch points where the fabric was folded and sewed.

Once everything is sewed back together, you can now reassemble the chair.  Make sure the paint is dry!  I waited 24 hours.  I cut the extra fabric into strips and tied it in knots around the top of the chair.

Here is the AFTER picture!

Sorry for such an extremely long post, maybe next time I'll try a video!  :-)  I hope this little (it seems harder that it really is) project will inspire you to jazz up your classroom by taking a boring piece of furniture and remodeling it to suit your personality.  A little fabric and a can of spray paint can go a long way to making your classroom visually appealing for your students.  It really was a fun project and it probably only took me a total of 4 hours total to complete this flip.  I look forward to hearing stories of how you get crafty in your classroom.  Leave a comment with your experience. :-)