Mexican Oilcloth

¡Viva Mexico!

Four years ago, when I moved into this house, Millett and Gene, who own Flashback, a vintage department store conveniently located a stone's throw from my front door, practically gifted me with a trio of red vinyl upholstered chairs, holdovers from some mid-century industrial setting. When I upgraded to a matching quartet of yellow Heywood-Wakefield classroom chairs (identical, not-so-coincidentally, to kitchen chairs my friends Melissa and James own), I retired the red chairs to the garage.

Last summer, the patio finally happened, and the chairs came out of hiding.

I'm no upholsterer, but I harbored a long-term fantasy about recovering the vinyl, and, last fall I took the plunge -- with one chair. The other two languished for another nine months, until last weekend, when I ferreted out my staple gun from the garage, cleaned off the semi-permanent cobwebs that cling to the legs of every stick of furniture stored outdoors, and, while watching Alfred Hitchcock put Tippi Hedren through her paces in Marnie during a day-long AH marathon on Turner Classic Movies (hey, it was 100 degrees outside), I finished one more chair.

What happened to the final chair? I got the seat and the back unscrewed from the metal frame, and carefully stapled oilcloth to the chair seat, then realized I didn't have enough oilcloth to finish the project.

¡Qué un lío! Quizá el año próximo...