Helping Your Glider Shed It's 1980's Look

So I love free furniture.  I will rarely turn it down...must to the dismay of my husband.  I am that person who sees a perfectly good dresser on the side of the road & has to pick it up.  It then goes into my husband's man garage until I can paint it, store it, put it somewhere, etc.  He loves it.  (I wish there was a sarcasm emoticon I could put here).  I have actually redone some of these pieces & sold them at yard sales & made some money, but that's a story for another day.  Today's story is on the free baby glider my aunt gave me from when my cousins were little.  My cousins are now all in their mid-20s, FYI. 

We had been shopping for gliders & found out they are so expensive.  Now I will admit that some of them feel as if you are sitting on a cloud of marshmallows & I would totally love to have them at my house.  But they are hundreds & hundreds & hundreds of dollars.  Before we could decide how we would finance such a thing, my aunt let me know that she had a free one for us to have.  I couldn't pass it up.  Not even when I looked at it & it took me right back to my parent's den circa 1985.  Two words - hunter green.  My mom was obsessed & it appears my aunt was as well.  They are twins, so I guess it was some kind of ugly color twin intuition.  Of course I didn't think to take a picture of the chair before I started taking it apart.  It might be doing everyone a favor to not see it in its full glory anyway.  Here is what the pieces of the chair looked like at least so you can get a good feel of the colors. 

You get the idea.  It was not super cute and did not remotely match the theme for the nursery.  But it was comfortable.  So I was determined to make this chair work for our Addy girl's nursery.  The first step was to take it all apart.  I used a screwdriver to take a part all of the wooden pieces of the chair so that they could be painted.  I used a seam cutter to take the fabric off of the cushions.  Then I went to Hobby Lobby (I know, shocking) when fabric was 30% off & bought some new fabric.  A cute pink pattern with polka dots.  I bought extra since the only thing I have ever sewn is Halloween costumes & maybe a hem on some pants.  P.S. I don't have a sewing machine.  I highly recommend doing this project with a sewing machine to save time & increase the likelihood that you don't want to harm yourself or others while doing this project. 

So I took the fabric apart & then just cut out my new fabric using the exact same pattern.  I left a little extra on the edges since I would be doing the sewing by hand.  I cut out pieces of fabric for the top of the cushion & for the bottom.  I then turned them inside out & began in a corner sewing them together.  This is when a sewing machine would have been very helpful because it would have gone so much faster.  I sewed the two pieces together inside out until there was barely enough room to fit the foam cushion back in.  Then I turned it back the right way, stuck the cushion in & continued sewing it up.  I made sure to have the edges that I sewed inside out be the ones that would show on the front of the chair cushion because it was a much cleaner line.  Below is a picture of the old fabric sitting on top of the new fabric before it was sewn onto the cushion.

Now the even harder part.  The cushion for the back of the chair.  I began the same way with using the old fabric to trace & cut out the new fabric for the two new pieces of fabric.  I then turned them inside out & began sewing the sides & the top together, leaving enough space at the bottom to slide the cushion back in.  Again, I would highly recommend a sewing machine here, but it is possible to do by hand.  I slid the cushion back in & sewed the bottom up.  Originally when I finished, it was a flat front.  However, the cushion inside the fabric actually had a smaller rectangle shape inset.  To give the fabric a little something extra, I decided to make the rectangle inset on the new chair as well.  Since the fabric was already sewn together & the cushion was in place, I got a super big needle & essentially traced the inset with thread to make the indention, going back & forth with the thread from the front to the back of the chair & then back to the front again, keeping the stitches close together.  It was pretty time consuming to keep the lines straight, but it turned out pretty good.  You can see in this up close picture, that the chair looks a little wrinkly, but when the chair is all put together, you really don't notice & most of the time there are some throw pillows in the chair so it really doesn't matter. 

The next part was definitely the easiest, the glider stool.  This is a shot of the glider stool cushion removed from the glider stool.  There wasn't a good way to remove the fabric from the glider stool board, so I just decided to leave it in place & staple the new fabric over the old fabric.  I just turned the glider stool board over, gathered the corners so that they tucked the way I wanted them to & used my upholstery stapler to staple the new fabric onto the glider stool board.  Luckily the drill holes were in the corners already, so I could reattach the board back onto the entire glider stool.  Here is a picture of the new fabric stapled on.  

 Here is a picture of the top of the glider stool board before it was reattached. 

Here is what the glider stool looked like when it was complete.  Oh, almost completely forgot this step.  The terrible pine color.  Yeah, I got my husband to paint all of that wood a cream color to match the nursery.  We just picked out a basic cream spray paint & he went to town spray painting it for me since we weren't sure the fumes would be good for the baby.  So the glider stool board was reattached & it was like new.  The seat cushions were tied to the chair & a whole new chair looking almost 30 years newer was born.

This is a shot of the finished project.  We have a small throw pillow & a roll pillow in the chair usually, but here is what it looks like without the pillows.  It's nothing fancy, but I think it's super cute, it's comfortable & it cost us under $50.  The fabric cost me about $30.  It took about 3 cans of spray paint, which cost about $3 a piece.  I already had the upholstery stapler & use it way more than I ever thought I would.  It costs around $10, give or take a couple of dollars.  I have tons of thread from one of my grandma's old sewing kits, so I used some of that, saving the few dollars that thread would have cost.  Yes, I have an abnormal amount of sewing thread at my house & no sewing machine.  It's ridiculous, I know.