Louis XVI Ornate Chair

Well, this is the last furniture piece for the French Country House. There are 14 chairs in my house! WHEW! I should be a chair master by now! It's been a lot of fun and finishing up the furnishings will be a breeze now. It's all downhill from here. I've learned so much from building this house from scratch. I feel I can use all that I've learned on my future projects too. And, I'm confident I can make any piece of dollhouse furniture from scratch now.

With this chair, it is made similar to the other little fancy chairs. I cut layers of wood and card out, glued the pieces together for the frame.

Then I made the decorations on the wood with a dimensional paint and let that dry, gave it a coat of gesso, then gold paint, then I covered the "cushions" with plain fabric and drew a floral pattern on with colored pencils, rubbed the fabric to fade it out a little.

I was all out of wooden porch rungs so I made the front legs from bamboo skewers and glued little strips of paper around them for the "turnings". They are so delicate, I really had to apply the wood glue around the tops of them to get them sturdy enough.

Glued the pieces together and added cord for trim. This little chair matches the couch somewhat. I wanted it to be a different color. The last chair is done. I definitely feel this project coming to an end now!

The back and seat measurements were a little unclear as to the seat height so I cut down the back to make it shorter. My cushion still overlapped the wood piece separating it from the back so my cushions touched. I would have had to lower the seat more to keep them from touching and that didn't look right to me at the time. That was the only "off" measurement in the instructions in the book that I found - but again, it might have been my measurements were off because everything else in the book was spot on, exactly right.

If I make another chair like this, I will either make a thinner seat cushion or shorten the back more and maybe lower the seat a little. You should be able to see the wood piece in the back support on this chair... but I still like it.