Red Velvet Cushion

Balancing on the arm of F's armchair in order to dictate my blogs and supervise the layout gets tedious.  Your equivalent might be parking your butt on the edge of one of those sloping ledges that serve as a 'seat' as bus stops these days. 

A more comfortable seat became available when she went out to pour her tea.

I made her sit on the floor where I could supervise by peering over her shoulder.

As an aside - see the scruffy fringe on my cushion? It was a lovely gold bullion-fringe once upon a time (long before my arrival in this world). One can seem remnants of it's former grandeur if it is viewed really (REALLY - like under a microscope) closely.  That fringe and the feather stuffing in my cushion used to be part of a red velvet cushion that came from F's grandmother (or even further back than that).  The red velvet eventually faded, got threadbare and fell apart.  Why didn't she replace it with red velvet?  The rather grand cushion (faded grandeur aside) got itself downgraded to being covered with a curtain shop sample.  There is a dirt-magnet mark on it where the sticky label got peeled off.

All those covers on the chair, by the way, are F's attempt to stop me from tearing the flange cord off the front.  F bought the chair, a scruffy old second hand thing, covered in grey cat hair, when she was a student.  She brushed it down and treated it with a deodorizer and owned it for the best part of another 30 years before she decided that, as priorities for demands on her income go, she could spend some money on reupholstering it.  

That was about 4 years into my residency. 

She bought the fabric she wanted.  She bought the flange cord she wanted it trimmed with and then she chickened out.  She decided against doing it herself and went looking for what looked like a really classy 'interiors' place and asked for their recommendation as to an upholsterer.

Long story short the result cost a lot of money and was a disaster - and just to point that out to her I tore the flange cord off the front within a couple of hours of the rubbishy job arriving back in the house.  It hadn't been sewn into the seams as it should have been, but had been substituted with same coloured curtain cord simply glued over the seam.

It is also quite clear the chair was not re-sprung or given new webbing at the time either, and since the day or its arrival back from the charlatan who called themselves an upholsterer, the new cover has not again seen the light of day. 

Suits me - I never liked the change anyway.