Here’s my new Ohio Star quilt square chair.
Here’s how it started.
It may have been a curbside rescue. If I was the sort of person to pick up other people’s trash. Which apparently I am.
One of the spokes holding the legs together was missing, so I bought a dowel that was the same diameter.
I chopped the dowel down to size.
Then I glued all the pieces together and let them dry.
I’d like to point out here that I am not exactly a furniture restoration expert. (The number of power tools I know how to operate can be counted on three fingers.) So, I’m not guaranteeing that this fix is going to maintain the structural integrity of the chair. Or hold up for more than 6 weeks. But it got the job done.
Once the chair was (more or less) stable, I sanded it down with my Mouse sander. The pointed tip works great for getting into little nooks and crannies, like the spaces between the spindles.
My original plan was to stain the chair.
But then I changed course and decided to paint it instead. With chalk paint. Which will stick to anything. So I could have totally skipped the sanding step.
I painted the whole chair with the black chalk paint.
Here’s what it looked like once I had the first coat on. I should have put a second coat on right away. But I was too impatient to get started on the quilt square seat, so I plunged ahead, leaving the second coat for the end.
The chair seat was 14ish inches deep …
… and 16ish inches wide.
With the seat being wider in the front than in the back, I decided the easiest way to center a square on it was with my tried-and-true eyeball-it-and-hope-for-the-best method. So I cut a 12-inch-by-12-inch pattern out of newspaper and just kept moving it around until it looked more or less centered.
I traced around the pattern with a white colored pencil.
Then I measured and marked every 3 inches and used a straight edge to connect the dots…
… which left me with a 4×4 grid pattern that was more-or-less centered on the chair seat.
Using a straight edge again, I drew diagonal lines from corner to corner in the squares.
To idiot-proof the painting process, I wrote a “W” on every triangle that I wanted to paint white.
Next I cracked open my white paint jar. The paint had separated so the top looked like an oily mess.
A little bit of stirring with a popsicle stick made it nice and creamy again.
I pulled my paintbrushes out of storage …
… and started filling in the triangles.
It took a few coats to cover the black.
Somehow I managed to screw up and paint one triangle that was supposed to remain black. Fortunately the paint was still wet when I realized my mistake, so I was able to wipe it off with a wet paper towel.
Once I had all the white triangles painted, I erased all of my pencil lines …
… and gave everything (black and white) a second coat of paint. The white needed a third coat, too, at least in some spots.
I did a little hand sanding with some fine grit sandpaper to distress the edges.
To protect the paint and darken it up a bit, I used some Folk Art antique wax left over from a previous project.
I applied the wax with a soft cloth, and wiped off the excess.
After the wax dried, I buffed the chair with a clean cloth.
Here is the finished piece. Proving once again the old adage that one man’s trash is another man’s Ohio star quilt block chair. Or something like that.
