Amish Gliders for a Brochure

My parents volunteered my design service to their Amish neighbors. This annoyed me because I’ve been very busy with other projects: getting my wedding photography business off the ground (designing 3 new business cards, a postcard, shooting as many weddings as I can and updating my website, updating my sample albums, online marketing) and trying to get into grad school (research, walking a professor through the letter of recommendation process, calling and traveling to the school for interviews, and learning actionscript and flash so I can have a super-sweet portfolio to showcase my video, interactive and photography work that will live on a DVD). Whew, I’ve been a busy girl.

You can imagine me bitching about how this is a waste of my time and is turning into a much more time-consuming project than I or my parents originally thought. When I asked my stepdad if I was going to get paid for this work, his response was “Why do you have to get paid for everything?” Coming from a man who in my shoes would definitely fight to get paid. Turns out the neighbor painted their garage, so my parents were making out in the deal.

Anyways, I did ask for a chair as payment. And why not, I’ve worked for an exchange. (I scored a sweet wreath from a portrait session last year. You can see it in my blog post.) I was hoping for a rocking chair. However they don’t make rocking chairs. They do make gliders! I was hoping for one, I got 2 with a table that attaches in between!

One of the chairs right before I went to work staining it.

First order of business was to stain it before winter arrived. I just wanted to paint it blue. Not like BLUE but a subtle greyish, new england blue. Some of my friends, who have done some wood work yelled at me and told me I should just stain it so I can see the the grain. I came up with a compromise, semi-transparent stain. It comes in a rainbow of colors (like curry!) I picked the color Gettysberg.

I spent Halloween Day staining my furniture. From 11:30 to 5 or 6 right when it was getting dark. I came in and my back hurt and my hands weren’t working because they were so cold. I went to 2 hardware stores that day. And and the end of the day, I had pretty blue chairs for my porch. Unfortunately, the wood sucked up the stain in some spots and I need to touch up my work.