Welcome 100 and Miss Lydia Pickett Dining Table/Chair kits

Woo hoo, we hit 100 followers!  I'm not sure who the 100th person is, as Rosamargarita is still showing as the first icon, but then maybe Blogger isn't showing them in chronological order?  Anyway, welcome to you, 100.

A lot of my free time and energy was spent dealing with all the post-burglary stuff, but I did get some work done on my Miss Lydia Pickett 1/24 Dining Table and Dining Chairs kits.

I had already put these together a year ago before I started the build, but they were only undercoated as I didn't know what colour my kitchen was going to be (or if I was even going to have a kitchen as there wasn't going to be an LP 1/24th house).  The kits went together fine, all the laser cutting was very precise as usual with the LP kits.  Most of the LP kits, despite being laser cut, achieve a fairly satisfactory 3-D look through layering of different thickness of wood, but I think the chair legs are one of the less successful designs.  They don't look terribly convincing, and nor do the table legs.

I wanted a look that wasn't too matchy-matchy with the kitchen cupboards so I decided to try out a bottle of DecoArt Weathered Wood crackling medium that I had in my stash.  First I painted over a thin coat of Anita's Dusty Green, which is the colour I used on the shutters.  When that was dry, I painted on a coat of the crackling medium.

You can see I am not bothering much with the seat or the back inside the oval, as these will be covered by upholstery.

Once the crackling medium was dry, I painted over a coat of Tapioca, the same colour I used on the kitchen cupboards.  I have to say that it didn't work incredibly well.  I guess crackling works better when the surfaces are flat. The chair/table legs are so fiddly to paint that the crackling medium made the paint go blobby rather than cracked.  It worked better on the table although not perfectly.  Once it was all dry, I sanded off the worst blobs, and dry-brushed to touch up a few bald areas, and it looks fair enough. 

One important piece of information that I can't see included in the instructions, is that the printed fabric that comes with the kit is on a paper backing that needs to be pulled away before you can use the fabric.  Each chair came with printed fabric upholstery, an extra placemat, and a piece of batting, as well as laser-cut cardboard ovals for the back and front of the chair, and a laser-cut cardboard seat. 

You need to glue the batting to the seat and one oval for each chair.  I found I could glue all four seats and four ovals to just one piece of batting.  I prefer to glue to the batting, weight it to dry flat, and then cut out the batting from around the card.

After cutting out the back fabric panel, I glued it over the card oval with no batting.  I found it surprisingly hard to get the script in the fabric to end up straight across the oval.  Then I glued the oval onto the back of the chair.

There is a little skirt provided to glue around the edge of the seat.  The instructions are silent on whether or not to continue the skirt across the back of the chair, although it is long enough.  And there is no picture of the back of the chair provided.  I tried it both ways and decided it would look funny if the skirt was only on three sides, so I took it across the back as well.  That meant that I had to notch the back piece so that I could fold in the top raw edge just on the back of the chair.

The front oval, and the seat, are made the same way by gluing the printed fabric pieces over the batting/cardboard pieces.  Then they are glued onto the chair.  I could see in the picture on the kit that the edge of the seat cushion had been finished with a twisted cord, although the instructions don't mention this.  I decided to do a cord for mine as well, made from one strand of embroidery floss twisted back on itself.  I like it!  Now just need to do the other three chairs.

The table comes with a thin printed paper to glue around the edges, which matches the printed fabric.  There is also an optional table runner included in the same script fabric.


You can see the LP Chicken Coop cabinet in the background.  I didn't use the chicken-wire effect plastic as I didn't like it.  I need to get some china and glass to put in it, it's looking a bit empty now that the kitchen is getting more finished.