My Author's Chair

I've been super busy the past two weeks getting ready for school.  Last Monday was our first day of school.  I've been teaching for 9 1/2 years and every year the first week of school does not get any easier.  Just when I think I have everything ready to go, something new happens and throws me for a loop.  This year, we had to start our Reading 3-D testing on the first day of school!  We only have 3 weeks to complete Dibels & TRC on all of our students.  I am also losing 3 days of testing due to a training that I must complete for my school.  This means that I have 6 days to finish my testing!  I can say that I survived the first week of school and it turned out to be a pretty good week!  

The past week, I've been working on my Author's Chair.  A co-worker gave me this chair during our mandatory work week, she has had it for a couple of years and it has been taking up space in her room.  She saw the chairs I've made for my reading center and thought that I could fix it up.  

This is the before picture.  This chair needs a lot of love!

After I finished painting!  But I'm still not done!

Now this is what I call an author's chair!  What first grader (or anyone) wouldn't want to sit on this?!?

Now you are probably wondering how I made something so amazing.  My first step was to paint the chair.  I got my paint from Home Depot.  They sell paint samples for less than $3 for a 7 oz can.  I had more than enough paint for this chair.  Wait til you see what I used my leftover paint on!  Since I used wall paint and was not sure how it would hold up on my chair, I decided to seal it with a sealer.  The sealer gave my chair a nice glossy finish.  Next, I had to sew my pillow/cushion.  It is amazing how many things I can create just by using a simple base stitch.  After I stuffed my pillow, I attached a teal boa, they have tons of colors at Hobby Lobby.  I sewed the boa around the edges of my pillow.  The boa was too long for my pillow, so I had to cut it to size.  I'm glad that I waited until after I finished sewing it on.  The end of the boa started shedding like crazy!  I super glued the cut end to make it stop.  This was a fairly simple project to do, it was just time consuming because I had to wait for the paint to dry, and having to apply multiple coats didn't help.  

I love my author's chair and cannot wait to share it with my class tomorrow!  

Amber