Owls

After I started being haunted by owls (see my post in April or May), I decided they are like my special guardians or something.  In that spirit, and because we had a big empty spot over the couch, I made this.  Happily, this project actually did get done in one day, unlike the couch.

Upholstering the Couch (aka Love Seat)

So, I've never really like our couch.  We inherited it from Todd's parents after they had it for who had it for who knows how long.  I was always wanting to get a new one, but I decided recently, in the spirit of not filling the landfills with more STUFF, to reupholster it.  I was all ambitious that it could be done in like one day, but that is not what happened, my friends.  No.  But, it is done now and here is the photographic evidence.

Of course I forgot to take a "before" picture, so this is a picture of Todd sitting on it one day.

My plan had been to carefully remove all the fabric, use the pieces as templates, sew them together on my sewing maching and reattach them to the couch.  That plan started getting complicated very early on.  For one thing, besides the cushions, not a single stich had been used.  Everything was stuck on with staples or tacks. 

The picture below is the jar of staples after I was done taking off all the fabric.  I had thrown away several handfuls before I started keeping them in the jar.

The next issue was that the fabric pieces I was taking off in no way could be used as a template. 

This is one example where you can kind of see that they just took some fabric and sort of made it work.  My personally theory is they took fabric from a couch and stuck it on the love seat.  There were a lot of places where there was randomly too much fabric.

In this picture you can see that the back of the fabric was all yellow and weird.  This couch was widely believed to be the most uncomfortable ever.  I discovered part of the reason was that instead of webbing, the person had used pieces of lightweight board.

So, I figured that once I got all the fabric off, it would be extra easy, because I could just staple everything on.  Well, extra easy it was not.  I didn't have tack strips, so I ended up hand sewing a ton of stuff so that the seams would lie flat.  I had to make up a bunch of stuff, too.  The back cushions were ridiculous, but mine are a little wonky, without having had a real pattern.  I also didn't do the best job with the webbing and the padding is lighter than it should be.  Still, I'm happier with it now than I was before.  Even if it does look and feel a little "homemade."

Why am I getting French Spam?

I think I don't want to know what these Spam subject lines mean:

"Le cadeau du printemps"
"La longueur enigmatique"
"Plus quelques centrimetres"
"Des sacs interessants feminins et les montres suisses"

I wonder if there is a hint to the reason for these french speaking spam emails in the subject of a different spam email:

"Julnc, check out the great annual sale."

It makes my brain hurt.  What does it mean?  Je ne sais pas.