Other stuff

This has not happened in a good long while.  It is winter miasma coupled with the invasion of Ukraine by a foreign power and I have family there.  Well my family has family and that makes it my family. I did not knit.  I planned to sew but that was too much.

So I did something that I had planned for the two or is it three years since I first bought this second hand chair.  

I am turning it into my perfect, I hope, knitting chair.  It doesn't  look like a big job but there was a lot of time spent making sure I was doing it right.  

When I was a kid these were called platform rockers.  I googled that.  There were dozens of styles and non like this.  I searched upholstered, I searched through blogs and videos and after a few hours of looking found one close to this.  Finally I knew what question to ask.  You had to be period specific to see this style.  Who knew. 

The first thing to do is to raise it about an inch.  Keith is undertaking that  job at Canadian Tire.  We are going to add a an inch thick piece of wood right where the feet and leg assembly attaches to the rocker part of the chair and he is searching for some longer bolts.  We have the wood ready to go and all we need is four bolts. Here is hoping CT comes through. Failing that, Home Hardware?  Peavey Mart?  Someone will have the bolt size we need.

My part of the renovation was to get rid of the arms.  I used to have a recliner chair styled very like this mid century chair and while it was okay to knit in, the arms were a problem.  It was much too easy to rest my forearms and I found that led to the start of the still present issues I have with my wrists and occasionally my hands.  The arms had to go.  

All I can say is glue in the 40's was really really good.  It was only held together with wood pegs and glue.  It took forever to loosen them enough to get the upper part of the arm off of the curved wooden part and I found that though I could separate the wood part from the upholstered part of the arm, I could not get the wood part off the chair.  I tried rotating the arm figuring that would loosen it enough to pull it off but no go.  I did manage to rotate the wood part down along the side of the chair seat  and that will have to do.  It looks all right and it is out of the way for my purposes.  

So today, when I did not have it in me to be light with my hands or gentle in any way, I had a big mallet and I pounded a bit here and there.  It was exactly right for how I felt.

I can sew tomorrow.