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Thursday, January 20, 2011

Butterfly Chairs

I finished the six chairs that I'm going to give to my youngest daughter some day when she gets married. I already finished her hutch to match but don't yet have the photos. I found these chair seats at a thrift store for $4.00 each and they were extremely well made and had nice lines. They are oak and were sort of boring by themselves. Normally I wouldn't paint good wood but oak is so plain and these were screaming to be gussied up a bit.

The yellow is a mis-tint that I had the guy at Sherwinn Williams just re-tint to a sort of buttery mustard yellow color. It's fairly neutral and has been a really sunny fun color to use. My daughter loves yellow so these will fit her sunny world just great.
She's also my beautiful little butterfly just flitting from one thing to another and blessing it with her happiness. I miss her so much.


The butterflies are from a Dover book I ordered online and then just photocopied the pages to cut and re-use over and over. I love the butterfly theme because there's so many colorful ones to choose from. I separated the cut outs into color schemes and then started just playing with the layouts. I wanted something different for each chair so that they each have their own personality. After cutting them out and deciding their placement I decoupaged them in place and then traced around them with a metalic pen, adding a few embellishments here and there. They're almost too pretty to sit on!!






Now the expensive part and real chore is to find quality sturdy legs or bases to install. I think these were bar tool tops because each of them has a plywood base underneath. I'm hoping to keep them the right height for a dining room table because we are giving Holly a nice walnut drop leaf table for her first home when she gets married. These will help set off the gorgeous walnut and be a fun showpiece in her home.

5 comments:

  1. These are just stunning. Holly's so lucky to get so wonderful home decor!

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  2. She doesn't have any place to put them yet so they'll sit in my storage till she gets her own apartment but hopefully that won't be too long. I hope she'll love them.

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  3. These are absolutely gorgeous. You didn't have any problems with the printer ink running when you decoupaged the butterflies? I've heard that can be a problem.

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  4. Those that sit on these can now be called flutter-butts.
    Butterflies have such intricate beauty at the microscopic scale. Being able to filter light with just making pores of varying widths to capture certain wavelengths of light is simply amazing.

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  5. Did you know that butterfly's see thousands more colors than human eyes do? http://www.learnaboutbutterflies.com/Anatomy.htm

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