Well, That Was Quick

Apropos of absolutely nothing, this blog has hit two milestones lately. First, according to Blogger, my last post was number 400. WooHoo! Second, also according to Blogger, I have now officially used up 1% of my available storage space for images. At this rate, I will run out of picture space roughly at post 40,000, which I will write sometime in the year 2140. After that, absolutely no more images will be published on this blog.


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Anyway, that wasn't what I wanted to report as "quick"; that was just a little meta-blogging. What I really wanted to report that was quick, was that our reupholstery project is done. Check it out:

This was a short, fun, high-payoff project. Wish we had more like that, and fewer of the long, annoying, what-does-it-matter types queued up on the to-do-list. Looks like the next big one will be rearranging and finishing out the garage.

Tonya is increasingly sounding like she's imagining reupholstering our sofa at some point, which sounds like a big (but worthwhile!) job. However, with three kids six and under running around, and with another little one on the way, it's a job that needs to be done in the garage and not in the living room. Thus, fixing up the garage needs to happen first.

But the fact that we did these little jobs first has given us confidence about tackling the big one. And we could tell that we were getting better at it as we went along. Take a look at the following picture, for instance:
Notice the difference in the heights of the seats. The chair on the left was the last one we did, finished tonight. The chair on the right was the second one we did, last Saturday. They contain exactly the same amount of material, but we managed to get the fabric on the second seat much more tightly stretched. When you reupholster, you have to compress your padding material as much as possible as you pull the fabric over it, to keep things from getting lumpy, uneven, and wrinkled. Well, we got better at it as we went along, with the result that the seat we did tonight is much more compact than the previous one.

Of course, it also doesn't feel quite so cushy on one's bum, which is somewhat ironic. We like making cushy seats, but the more experienced we get, the less cushy our seats become.

(It reminds me of that guy we met at the spinning/weaving show last year, whose first attempt at spinning had produced an uneven, lumpy skein that won first prize in the "homespun" category. Now that he's much more experienced and consistent at spinning, he couldn't make that kind of yarn anymore if he wanted to.)


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Update: Well, it appears that four of my 400 posts were unpublished drafts that somehow got stuck in the ether. I'm only now on number 397 instead of 401. Please, no weird comments about math abilities....