Knitted Chair Seats aka A Five-Year Project Completed!

I found these chairs next to the dumpster at one of my college apartments and immediately thought of the knitted chair seats in Weekend Knitting (one of my all-time favorite knitting books!) I have been out of school for 5 years now, if that gives you any indication of just how long this project has languished.

The chairs were originally painted orange and had strange, pointy, wooden spikes on the tops of the ladder backs so I wanted to strip the paint and take the saw to them, before I could even start on the seats. I restained them and speckled the finish a bit with some paint and then whipped up the seats in a couple of months. Unfortunately, this was back when I knit everything too large. So the seats wound up to saggy and the boiling-water trick mentioned in the book for shrinking the seats knit of nylon cord only works temporarily. So the project languished.

Until I saw the chair pillow project in Natalie Chanin's new book. I don't know why I didn't think of just putting a pillow on the seat before. It was just the motivation I needed to sew the second seat onto the chair and to start picking fabric from the Alabama Chanin website for the seat cushions! And now the chairs are finished enough that they could be used (with temporary pillows) for brunch with our visiting friends last Saturday (the blue chair at the close end was not one of the project chairs but one repainted by my grandmother when this table was hers in the 50's).