BLUE STRIPED POLKA BIRDS

I’m having the hardest time decorating my office.  Well, not really my whole office, just choosing the furniture.  Well, not really all the furniture, just a chair.  Well, and not really even finding a chair.  I already have the chair.  OK, let me start over.

The "Sweetheart" Chair

I’m having the hardest time picking out a fabric to recover my grandmother’s chair for my office.  It’s the sweetest chair ever.  In fact I call it a sweetheart chair, but it’s technically called a slipper chair.  You know, one of those old-fashioned parlor chairs, like from your grandma’s bedroom (that’s where mine used to be, many many years ago).  It’s got a skirt and no arms and a cushioned seat and back, and the back is shaped like a heart, sort of, with a dip in the middle.  See what I mean?  And it’s so sweet!  I can’t help but think of it as a sweetheart chair. 

Elm-lined street   aaaah

My grandparents lived on Hamlin Avenue in Park Ridge, Illinois, a pretty northwest suburb of Chicago, in a really neat house on a beautiful street lined all up and down with elm trees.  And you know what that means: sometime in the late 60’s or early 70’s, they no longer had a street lined with elm trees, thanks to Dutch Elm Disease.  Wait, does everyone know about this, or was it just a Chicago phenomenon?  I have no idea.  But I can tell you that in Park Ridge, everyone knew about it and it changed the face of many neighborhoods, my Grandma and Grandpa McCormick’s included; apparently there were a lot of elm trees in Park Ridge and the surrounding areas.  Hamlin is still a pretty street, though—just not covered with a canopy of elms like it used to be.  Sad, really.

Now?  No more trees (aerial view)  :- (

See?  This is the side!

 At any rate, they had a house I loved.  And I’d love to live in it now!  For some reason, it pretty much stood sideways to the street; the front door was on the side, facing the driveway.  And when you walked in, the stairs, with their deep rose-colored carpeting, were straight ahead, with the living room on the right and the dining room to the left.  When I was in the house, it never seemed sideways; it seemed just right.  But when I think of it now, or when I drive by every 10 years or so, I wonder about that.  I’m guessing some architect was thinking about living in the house, rather than worrying about where the front “should” be.  Because the way it sits, you had a nice big bay window in the living room (complete with table on which sat a lamp with hanging crystals that caught the light that I used to love) that looked out onto the street, and when you were in the kitchen, you had a big window looking out onto the lovely back yard.  If that house were facing the street “correctly,” if you will, that living room would have looked out onto the side and the kitchen would have looked out onto the driveway.  Not that it was a bad driveway.  But, still.  So whatever the reason the house looks out at you from its side--and with just a minute’s more thought here it occurs to me that it was really probably because that’s the only way it fit the lot!—it was a good decision.  Boy, I wish I lived there now!

My grandparents’ bedroom took up the two front upstairs windows looking out onto the street.  Their room was like something you see in the movies from the 40’s.  It was green and pink, with pink chiffon curtains on the windows.  It even had a pink tiled bathroom.  My grandma had a skirted dressing table with a glass top, covered with beautiful bottles and make-up and nice-smelling boxes and lots of other ladies’ things, and the sweetheart (slipper!) chair sat at that table.  The chair was covered in green tiny wale corduroy, with a gathered green skirt.  Green tiny wale corduroy and pink chiffon, how neat is that?   Pretty neat, I say.

Yeah, kind of like this

Now for some reason, my family has never been big on handing things down from generation to generation.  I can’t think of one piece of furniture in our house growing up that had belonged to anyone—other than Barrow’s or Ladlow’s or Pruitt’s furniture stores—before us.  My parents were all about the “new, modern” way of life in the 1960’s.  I recall we had a very formal pretty white brocade sofa (white!!), with a white and gold openwork divider (I want to say it was made of plastic, but can that be?) separating living room and dining room, and there was a huge green sort of textured shiny pillow with black tassels on the floor, standing next to a three foot tall skinny aqua jar with a smoky brown glass stopper that came to a point. 

Almost like you’d expect Jeannie to come out of it.  (If you don’t know who Jeannie is, then you need to rent the 60’s TV show I Dream of Jeannie, with Larry Hagman and Barbara Eden.  Larry Hagman was a beanpole back then, if you can believe it, and Barbara Eden [aka Jeannie]—with her tiny little outfits that almost showed her belly button—was, well, not a beanpole.  That’s all I’ll

Jeannie inside her bottle

say about that.)  I also seem to recall deep turquoise pillows on the white couch.   So you can see that charming old furniture from the attic of Grandma and Grandpa McCormick or even Great Aunt Margaret (Grandma McCormick’s sister, who was like another grandma to us), or even Grandma Eimers (my dad’s mom) would not have fit in.  Besides, Grandma Eimers lived in a 2nd floor walk–up and I’m pretty sure she didn’t have any extra furniture hanging around.

So anyway, the point is that our family doesn’t have all kind of things that have been around forever, lovingly passed down through the generations.  And even though I can’t remember it ever being in our house when I was growing up (and we certainly didn’t have an attic, living in Arizona, the land of no attics), somehow we held on to Grandma’s chair.  And now I have it.  I don’t remember how that happened, either, but I’m virtually certain it’s not a style anyone else in the family would want.  Well, my sister Nancy would like the sentiment of it, I’m sure, but I double-checked with her and she’s fine with me having it.  Phew.

So embarrassing!

So I have it.  And I love it!  And I love that it’s in my office, which is the complete wrong room for a lady’s slipper chair.  And that’s perfect; something to make my office nice and girly, even while it’s efficient and messy all at the same time.  So, since the chair is more than 50 years old and it’s covered in worn green corduroy, for heaven’s sake, it’s time to refresh it.  And it might be nice to refresh the seat cushion as well while I’m at it, so that one can sit on it without listing to one side due to a cushion that somehow has worn very unevenly.  That would be embarrassing, for both the sitter and me, as you can imagine.

So I’m having a hard time picking a fabric that represents all of that history and emotion, yet still rings out “ME.”  This fabric must honor the fact that it belonged to my grandmother, that it’s from the 40’s (my favorite era for music and clothes and, sometimes, décor), and that now it belongs to an independent, fun, modern working woman (that would be me, in my deepest wish).  You have to admit, those are a lot of requirements for a fabric.  So much pressure!   After hours and hours of searching for fabric with my mom (Grandma McCormick’s daughter, no less) I’ve finally narrowed it down to light blue with white polka dots.  Or white with light green twigs and pink and blue birds.  Or green with white stripes.  Or maybe the mint with white polka dots.   See how hard?  I wish I had two chairs, it would be so much easier!   And a couch.

Oh my gosh, I’m getting an idea…   I could always get another chair, not identical but maybe a more modern complementary chair, that I could put a complementary fabric on!   So I could choose two fabrics!  The perfect solution.  Well, except for do you know how much it costs to re-cover a chair?  Holy smokes, all you people out there undecided about what career you want, hear me now!  Re-upholsterer has to be high on the list of well-compensated craftsmen, if you will.  Just a little tip from a shopper.

I'm pretty sure this man is a millionaire.

So I think maybe I’m committed to committing to just one fabric, after all—a good exercise for me, actually; I sometimes do have trouble making decisions.  OK, that’s it.  It’s the blue polka dot!

Or wait, is it the mint colored polka dot?  But what other colors really go with mint?  And the taupe twigs and blue and pink birds have lots of colors to coordinate with so maybe that’s more sensible...  

See how hard this is?   Calling Grandma McCormick—or, heck, any clever decorator from this very era (Kevin Sharkey, can you hear me??)—can you help me out here?