Filed under: Fashion, Misc. | Tags: Chair, collar, Colour, dinosaur, doodle, draw, elegant garage sale, Fashion, forever21, isabel marant, karen walker, Miu Miu, Necklace, Prada, rainbow thread, rhinestone, sea of shoes, sharpie, She Does The City, tatty devine, Tom Binns, Toronto, Vintage
Way back when (in 2009) I read a post over at Sea of Shoes that featured classically shaped furniture covered in canvas and drawn all over by kids. Alright, drawn all over by children, at a hospital, for charity; there was a cause. Well I found a chair for $50 over at the Elegant Garage Sale and had my own cause: to recreate that awesome Sea of Shoes chair.
It was a year before I actually started working on the project when I eagerly wrote a post about it here on this blog. I quickly ran into a problem. Not knowing any children and not really trusting any of them with my soon-to-be awesome chair I was begging my sister and friends to help me cover all the fabric in doodles. Adults can doodle for a while, but then our imagination runs out and someone threatens to scribble down a curse word and there goes that afternoon activity. Perhaps it’s needless to say that the chair sat with many a bald spot for months on end, but here I am saying (typing) it.
The chair, in all its incomplete glory, came in handy last year when I competed in BAM! – the She Does the City video contest. At the start of each video I wrote the corresponding title on the chair and it probably became the most memorable part because..who draws all over a chair? But after that, after I did not win the aforementioned contest, the chair became untouchable, almost sacred. Maybe I thought the chair was bad luck, maybe I’m just making excuses. The good news is that the chair is finally complete!
If you’re a jewelry connoisseur, comme moi, then you’ve seen the multitude of necklaces covered in rainbow thread, or the sudden over-accessibility of neon-coloured rhinestone collars — Tom Binns would be spinning in his grave, you know, if he were not alive. While I’m not necessarily jumping all over the trend (not shocking with my devotion to black) I like the idea of childhood whimsy behind it.
Rainbow thread brings me back to senior kindergarten when the coolest, most popular girl, Courtney, put rainbow thread in her running shoes and won all the boys’ fancy and clearly some of the girls’. Now my most favourite pieces reflect my childhood from my cat covered Miu Mius to my Cinderella-esque Pradas and most recently my navy and white Isabel Marants that look identical to my first pair of Spice Girls-era platform sneakers. Kitties, Disney, and Girl Power — my life as a little girl in a nutshell, now interpreted in high fashion.
Embrace your past and wear your inner-child on your neck. And maybe add a dinosaur, or two.
Rainbow thread necklaces: Forever21, rhinestone: vintage, sunglasses: Karen Walker, t-rex: Tatty Devine.
If you read this blog fairly often (or even don’t) then it’s no secret that I am hugely influenced by Jane Aldridge’s blog Sea of Shoes and beyond that, am totally obsessed with it. (I’m so sorry I ended that sentence with “it”, Niles Crane would have my head.) Anyway last summer I saw her post entitled “‘Charity’-for Branded” in which she and her mother had seen an article in Australian Vogue about a furniture set that had been drawn on by children and they wanted to recreate it for charity. They took one of their old chairs, covered it in canvas, took it to a children’s hospital so they could all colour on it and then the money from the auction of the chair would go back to that hospital. The outcome of that chair:
The second I saw this I knew I wanted one. No, mine won’t be drawn on by children since I don’t know any and I won’t be auctioning it off…okay, I suck and they’re much more noble, I’m sorry, I just want a chair like that! Moving on, I knew it had to be a nice chair or else it wouldn’t look right, and I don’t have gorgeous chairs lying about my house that I can cover in canvas so the search began for a cheap, but workable, chair. That’s where one of my favourite stores comes into play, The Elegant Garage Sale. The title says it all, it’s basically a well put together junk store by Bayview and Eglinton, but they have some real gems there and usually at reasonable to shockingly low prices. I found a chair for $50.00, had the wood painted and it reupholstered with white canvas:
My chair!
This was all done last summer, the reupholstering done by October, and until now it has just been sitting in our living room covered in plastic. Until now because now it has a home! It will be moving out of the living room and into My living room come October (only took a year plus…) So I’ll be posting updates of how the chair is coming along here. It has to be drawn on on the seat, the sides, the back and the actual backside of the chair since the canvas extends that far. So far my sister has helped, my mum has promised to and friends who have been aware of the project since the very beginning either want to help or feel quasi-obligated, which is fine by me.
I’m not sure if a stranger would be able to tell the age of the person who has done the majority of the drawing, but I like to think they would guess a number far lower than 20. My mum says a lot of it looks exactly like the drawings I used to make when I was little which is either a compliment to my little self or an insult to my older self… So much more to draw and therefore more to come!
I wear black 