Junior Fashion Designer

Madeline - Fashion Designer

David and I have this antique rocker in our family room.  The rocker itself is gorgeous.  The rocker and its chair's frame are a nice wood.  The upholstery, however, is in horrid condition and so I have just been hiding the "yuck factor" by covering it with a throw.  It doesn't sound pretty that way....because it is not.  Yet, it looks a lot better than exposing the true condition of the rocker.  For years, I have been meaning to take the rocker into get reupholstered but I just never seem to have that couple extra hundred dollars lying around the house.  There always seems to be more pressing issues for that "extra" money.  Since I successfully tackled recovering the chairs to my dining room set, I have become a bit more brave.  However, this rocker will certainly be much more difficult to revamp than those chairs were.  It will no doubt, be tricky!  Nonetheless, my thought is that I can't possibly make the rocker look anything worse than it already does.  And so, after a few yards of fabric are purchased and some time and muscle are invested, my goal is to have a "new" piece of furniture that I can (hopefully) be proud to show off.

Today, after picking Madeline up from school, we headed over to the local Jo-Ann Fabric to browse the home decorating fabrics.  Unfortunately, I didn't find anything I liked.  Not even the special order materials offered me a choice in which I was interested.  (It looks like finding the right fabric will be a bigger challenge than I anticipated)  Before entering Jo-Ann's I wondered how Madeline would do with occupying herself as I browsed.  What a boring shopping trip for a 5 year old!  Madeline, however, held her own.  She was fascinated by the free fabric samples tucked into a plastic sleeve at the end of each roll.  I didn't want her taking the samples from the sleeves because those were "for the grown-ups", yet, I let her keep any samples that had already fallen out of the sleeves and onto the carpet.  My time at Jo-Ann's became a scavenger hunt for Madeline.  By the time I was ready to leave, Madeline gathered a good handful of stray fabric samples.

Madeline's Pony Fashions

When we got home, I set out to finish what I had started while Madeline was at school - tearing apart and cleaning my family room.  As I worked, Madeline kept herself extremely busy with those fabric samples.  She sat the kitchen table with scissors, Elmer's glue and scotch tape and she created the most impressive dress collection for her My Little Pony toys.  Madeline was quite proud of her work (and so was Mama)!  Personally, I am glad this all worked out so well because with the rocker material still not found, I see many more trips to fabric stores in our future!!