The case for safety glasses

Wednesday was quite the class – we made some progress on our chair, and, with only 5 classes to go, we’re still feeling confident we’ll finish this semester.

We had one little, minor, very insignificant mishap though. And it was an accident.

In short, I shot my mom in the head with my staple gun.

Don’t worry – we’re all ok now.

Here’s how it went down:

I was using a staple gun I haven’t used before and I couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t working (ironically, the safety lock was doing its job). I was looking at it trying to figure out why my trigger was stuck when suddenly the safety lock released and a staple was forcefully shot in the direction of my mom’s head (who was not wearing safety glasses . . . only a few inches lower and it would have been her right eye!).

Luckily, it just got caught in hair – no blood, no pain, no penetration – it was a VERY close call. Either she was far enough away from me that it just didn’t have enough force OR (and this is my theory because I swear I was not pointing my staple gun at her) it hit the table pretty hard, bounced off, and hit her in the head.

I’m still feeling a little guilty (sorry, mom!) and will wear my safety glasses from now on AND be way more careful with my staple gun.

Now, onto the actual work:

Attaching fabric to a rounded chair proved to be this week’s major challenge. I’ve never worked with a chair this shape and had an incredibly difficult time figuring out how to attach the fabric without a single wrinkle, pleat, lump, pull, etc. . . . turns out, that’s not exactly possible (at least not for beginners).

After tacking, removing tacks, re-tacking, removing those, tacking again . . . . for what seemed like HOURS my frustration got the best of me. For the life of me I could not figure out how to ensure that fabric was perfectly smooth on the rounded front of the chair.

(I mean, really. How in the world could this be ok for the front of our chair?)

(This is the back of the chair -much easier to tack that fabric down back here)

Our teacher swore the major lumps would come out and that it was fine - out of complete frustration I just left it. Once the staples were in place, and I think once the trim is on, it should at least appear as smooth as I was hoping for.

(It seemed like with each staple the fabric smoothed out a bit)

(Looks better already! Don't worry - just the front is done in this photo- those side wrinkles get nice and smooth too!)

Once our seat was in place, we moved onto the inner arms. This definitely isn’t as tricky, but we ran out of time before we completed them. For now, tacks are holding them in place giving our chair more and more of a completed look:

(The seat looks pretty good here, right?)

Next week's plan: finish those inside arms and then we just have inside back, outside back, and outside arms and we're done! We're almost ready to start rearranging furniture to give her a prominent place in the living room where we can show off all our hard work.