Makeover | Painting a quilt square chair

Here’s my new Ohio Star quilt square chair.
painted Ohio Star quilt square chair
Here’s how it started.
fixing a broken chair

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.
dowel
I chopped the dowel down to size.
replacing a missing spindle on a chair leg
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.

chair makeover
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.
chair makeover
My original plan was to stain the chair.
chair makeover
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.
painting a wood chair
I painted the whole chair with the black chalk paint.
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.
chair makeover
The chair seat was 14ish inches deep …
making a quilt square design on a chair seat
… and 16ish inches wide.
chair makeover
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.
Ohio Star quilt square design
I traced around the pattern with a white colored pencil.
Ohio Star quilt square design
Then I measured and marked every 3 inches and used a straight edge to connect the dots…
chair makeover
… which left me with a 4×4 grid pattern that was more-or-less centered on the chair seat.
chair makeover
Using a straight edge again, I drew diagonal lines from corner to corner in the squares.
chair makeover
To idiot-proof the painting process, I wrote a “W” on every triangle that I wanted to paint white.
chair makeover
Next I cracked open my white paint jar. The paint had separated so the top looked like an oily mess.
painting a chair
A little bit of stirring with a popsicle stick made it nice and creamy again.
painting a chair
I pulled my paintbrushes out of storage …
painting a chair
… and started filling in the triangles.
Ohio star quilt square chair
It took a few coats to cover the black.
painted chair
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.
Ohio Star quilt square chair
Once I had all the white triangles painted, I erased all of my pencil lines …
chalk painted chair
… and gave everything (black and white) a second coat of paint. The white needed a third coat, too, at least in some spots.
Ohio Star quilt square design on chair seat
I did a little hand sanding with some fine grit sandpaper to distress the edges.
quilt square chair seat
To protect the paint and darken it up a bit, I used some Folk Art antique wax left over from a previous project.
antiquing a wood chair
I applied the wax with a soft cloth, and wiped off the excess.
antique wax
After the wax dried, I buffed the chair with a clean cloth.
painted chair
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.
distressed Ohio Star quilt square chair

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