A slightly different commission.
I changed the fabric on the school hall's chairs, which had seen their day. Since the room is already too small thanks to rolls of wadding and piles of fabric, I took the chairs on 10 at a time.
So that doing the work and the result could give some creative joy, I decided (with the client's agreement) to make the chairs colourful. As fabric I used the plain materials left over from the beanbags and bought toning upholstery fabrics to go with them, factory production offcuts.
Using production offcuts matters to me because of the principles of sparing nature. I took this work on with the same wish, to give the school's chairs a new life. Otherwise a load of chairs would have found a place at the tip.
My small helper was there too and helped as much as he could. It was very touching to watch him at work and I tried not to interfere, but a child's hand soon tires of holding a heavy drill and I had to support him a little.
He stayed in the studio busying himself calmly for several hours. Once the screws were drilled out and the frames stacked, he cut the frayed threads off the seat bases with scissors. Half an hour, very intently, now and then squealing happily that he was cutting fabric. 🙂 Then I gave him a couple of sheets of paper and he cut them very diligently into tiny pieces. After that his favourite activity: the button game. A pot full of buttons and a couple of empty pots besides, and half an hour of fiddling in the corner of the rug is guaranteed.
When his mother came and Mathias waved to me, he assured me by way of consolation: "I will come and help you again tomorrow, otherwise you will not manage on your own." 🙂
And that is truly how it is. It is so dull to potter and fiddle alone. Much more fun when somebody keeps asking: and what can you do with this? And what can you do with that? And otherwise studies and pokes at everything and explains it all.
A little statistics: each chair took up to 150 staples in all. The seat was wooden and gave no trouble, but the backrest, which was made of impregnated hardboard, was so dense that despite a proper builder's staple gun most of the staples went in crooked and would not go in at all. Into the first 10 chairs I eventually hammered close to 2000 staples. Quite unfamiliar work for me. But the result is pretty. The client liked it very much too, that the result is so colourful and cheerful.
