Bench Re-do

I really like all the great patchwork chairs that are appearing all over Pinterest these days. We have a pretty large master bath, with a good chunk of superfluous space in the middle of the room. I would love to have a really wild, funky, patchwork chair to set in there. But I've only recovered one piece of furniture in my life and that was in high school. Considering my inexperience, I thought maybe I should try a patchwork bench to see just how difficult such a project might be.

So when my bff was here last week, we shopped a thrift store in search of a long bench. We didn't find a long one, but we did find a couple of short ones which I bought:

Then we gathered some screw drivers, pliers and wine and sat on the floor to start removing the old fabric. What a chore that was! We finally got one bench mostly cleaned of all the old staple bit and pieces, so we primed and painted it. While it was drying, we went out and loaded up on a few upholstery remnants.

From the remnants, we cut random sized squares and rectangles and sewed them together. Then I backed the whole piece with lightweight fusible interfacing because I had added a couple quilting cottons to the mix.

Finally, we were ready for the fun stuff! We had purchased a new electric staple gun and couldn't wait to start shooting it. We stapled the patchwork piece to the bench and then hot-glued a piece of trim around the bottom edge to cover the raw edge of the fabric.

And this is how it turned out:

They'll sit in an entry room and won't get much use - really they're mostly decorative, so I'm not too worried about how well the hot glue will secure the trim.

I still have the other one to do and I'm dreading the removal of all those staples! But the most important thing I learned is, upholstery is hard! I sure don't want to tackle a big ornate chair.

Here's another picture of the two, side-by-side:

Hey! Maybe I can talk my dad into pulling all those staples for me....