July 30, 2012

Vintage magazine rack

I found this poor old thing at a yard sale. It’s not so much that I liked the style ( I don’t really) or had to have it. It was more that I couldn’t leave the old dear there to suffer a scrap heap fate. It did have potential, after all.

Little did I know the epic journey this rack and I were to take.

Have a look at him before work started.

There was no small amount of sneezing going on while I used the seam ripper to get the cover off. It was covered in dust and the reminder of thousands of ciggies smoked around it.  Pretty awful.

I initially began with a coral coloured fabric, and used the old cover as the pattern. But when I put the new cover in to fit it, it was too short. Odd, as I had used the old cover for reference. I called Steve up and he had a go with the same result. It was at this point that I recalled that I had the ‘before’ pics and we had a look. Note, in the pic above, how there is a hole cut in the fabric, as if to make room for you to pick up the rack – but the natural handle is the very top piece of wood, not the middle one on the bottom, as you see it here. This led me to believe that someone had, at some point, shortened the cloth part, as the hole for the handle made no sense.

But now I have a hole in the fabric I cut that made no sense. I tried to be OK with it, but it made me twitchy. Dammit I bought that fabric online at Tonic Living, but I just couldn’t…

So out came fabric #2 – a lovely remnant from my local Fabricville – white with blue peacock feathers. I decided a little pop of white would be nice on the frame, so I painted the binding pieces atfer giving the wood a nice cleaning with the trusty Circa 1850 wood cleaner. It was a whole new creature once cleaned!

I then cut a new piece of cloth, deciding to keep it at the short length with no hole for the non-existent handle. With this done and neatly hemmed, I pinned it on the frame to see how it looked. Steve came by.

“That fabric ought to be two sided, so any way you look at it you see the nice pattern,”

Pfft. Would that really be necessary?

*twitch*

Grumbling about how little of this lovely fabric I had, and what a great deal I got on it, I cut another length and reworked the piece, sewing them together then creating pockets for the rod of the frame to fit in. Unscrew the frame, slide the fabric on, and screw it back together – that the whole thing didn’t crumble irretrievably at this point is as much a surprise to me as it is to you.

So here it is, the I Climbed A Mountain Magazine Rack:

I still don’t love it – it’s just not my style. But sometimes when you have invested this much in a relationship, you just see it through to the grim end, no matter what the cost to you in fabric.