Would you ever consider recovering your furniture with this stuff?
No?
Well, maybe you would just like to giggle at the account of someone who did.
*****
This is the tale of the great cat claw caper other wise known as the story of how I came to re-cover a chair with pickle juice, gelatin and twine. To be clear there are no typo's or incorrectly auto corrected words in that last sentence and perhaps more importantly I have not been drinking today.
Well, not yet.
Scouts honer, I really did re-cover a chair with twine and I used all the pickle juice that I could rummage from my fridge to make this DIY glue. I did have to resort to buying some straight vinegar for this project as it required a lot of glue but if you know me at all you will know how delighted I was to learn that I could also use the juice from all my pickled items, a here-to-for completely disposable item.
The story begins with these two culprits.
They look quite innocent don't they? But I assure you that while they appear to be harmless, furry and cute they are frequently up to no good, snagging curtains, knocking nick nacks on the floor, for the dogs to find and chew to pieces. But for the purpose of this post I will share their most vicious bit of treachery.
They have done this...
and this...
to this.
I won't try to convince you this is a priceless antique, or even real leather. So maybe it wasn't actually a heart breaking loss. Still, it did have a purpose in our living room.
You may think that it's purpose was to be sat upon, but we don't actually do a lot of living in our living room. Mostly, we just pass through it on our way to the kitchen for beer, snacks and sometimes even a full meal. So this chairs main purpose was to look, if not good and heirloomy, at least presentable.
As you can see from the quality of this mass produced chair I don't really have that high of criteria for what is presentable, but the new needle pricked finish provided by the cats, did cause this chair to drop below even my menial standards. Now a normal DIYer might have just made a new cover for this chair and since I do like to think of myself as almost normal I did give this idea some consideration.
Unfortunately I have not been able to convince the cats to keep their claws to themselves and I feared a similar fate for the new cover whatever the material.
I have observed that our felines do seem to love their cat scratch post and that got my wheels spinning. What if the chair could withstand cats scratching and still look presentable? I reasoned that I could cover the chair in twine similar to the scratching post and meet the a fore mentioned criteria. I can't say for sure whether or not this idea presented itself before or after a cocktail. But the vision persisted and so I pondered what I could use to glue the twine to the chair. I literally spent days considering my options and searching the home improvement stores for a suitable product. Much too my dismay nothing seemed right. Not only would the pricing be ridiculously high (more than I paid for the chair in the first place) but all of these adhesives came with hazardous chemical warnings and most importantly I didn't even think that they would work for my project.
Feeling a bit dejected I searched on line and some how stumbled onto this "Make your own all natural glue video" With a little bit of hope and a fair amount of skepticism I decided to give it a go.
One of the benefits of working with trash and ruined items, is you don't really have to worry about messing up. There is a certain amount of freedom in it and that is how you can come to the conclusion that it makes perfect sense to put pickle juice on your living room furniture or Crisco on your shoes (but that is a whole other story. :-)
Anyway, can you imagine my glee as I discovered that it was working? And in addition to working it also had no toxic properties and actually used something from my fridge that was destined to be tossed down the drain. Most people probably don't appreciate the joy of finding uses for pickle juice, which is why I said earlier, that I like to think of myself as almost normal. But, if you can share my excitement, you get that it is an Upcycling Thing.
The process is pretty simple but it did take quite a lot of time. I decided to follow the original lines of the chair. I mixed up a batch of the glue and then started with a small section.
I used a small paint brush to apply a thin layer of glue to the chair and then working in small sections laid down the twine and then saturated the twine with the glue.
I used some straight pins to temporarily hold the twine as needed.
Once a section was dry I moved on to the next section.
I purposely left a small gap between the sections, then I used some black rite dye to color some of the twine.
To finish the design I used the black twine to fill in the gaps for a contrasting color.
At this point I was pretty happy with the end result. There were however two problems. You may have been anticipating the first problem ever since you heard the word twine, which of course is not the most soft and comfortable material. If you are wondering what twine feels like after being soaked and dried in pickle juice glue well, it is good and bad. It is bad because it take the comfort properties of twine and makes them 10 times worse. But it is also good because the twine is now hard enough to sand and sand and then sand some more.
The second problem was the dogs. They where delighted by this new giant pickle flavored lolly pop in the living room. I assure you that there is no lingering vinegar aroma detectable to a human nose but apparently I can't speak for these two.
Now I would never have guessed that dogs would like the taste of vinegar but apparently mine do.
I decided it would probably be a good idea to put some kind of finish on the chair anyway and hoped that it would deter the pups from licking the twine right off the chair. Minwax polycrylic is my go to finish for a lot of my projects. It is water based, easy to use and clean up, so I decided to use it on this project as well.
So far I have not seen anymore interest from the dogs so I believe my plan has worked.
I can't really speak for how well this new finish will hold up against the perilous conditions of our household.
It has however made it through it's first week without incident so I am cautiously keeping my fingers crossed.
:-)
Happy Upcycling,
My crazy math equation
