Chair pads again

 

I recovered the seats of our dining room chairs last spring, and it was basically an exercise in uselessness.  The medium-weight upholstery fabric I'd used bunched over the decrepit old foam (I'd not bothered to replace it), and something about the nap of that particular fabric just seemed to attract cat hair even worse than what had been on there before.  The new dining room is headed for a different set of colors, too, so the orange hue wasn't going to work.  This time I went out and bought brand new foam and I'm using a laminated cotton fabric, which is similar to oilcloth but lighter weight and more stretchy.  I don't think cat hair will stay on it at all, and most spills should wipe up easily (here's hoping), but I am a little concerned about the durability, given children with forks and cats with claws.  We'll see.  In the meantime, I really love the Amy Butler fabric and I can't wait to see it with the blue we're going to paint the walls in this room.  (Note on that:  you can see the wallpaper in here. There is a certain vintage appeal to this paper, I guess, but I'm way too fickle about prints to have them pasted on the wall.  I need a clean, solid backdrop on the walls so I can choose other prints at will!  Besides, you can't have flocked wallpaper and cats who rub up against walls.  Ick.)

Yesterday was a special day here.  We celebrated Rob's birthday in the dining room, in full view of the kitchen through the new pass-through!  I still need to paint it (along with all the other surfaces in the rooms it joins--oy), but I already love it.  It's amazing how much it changed our house!  Now I can see the sunlight from windows in every room of the first floor while I have breakfast at my kitchen table.  Dorothy made a paper chain for our birthday celebration and I hung it in the opening.  I can tell I'm going to need a couple nails, or maybe a tension rod, to hold this sort of temporary (yet eternal, ha ha) decoration.