The New Old Highchair

While we were in St. Francis, I asked my mom to dig out my brother and my old highchair. It's a sweet specimen from the 70's, and I love it. Officially it's a vintage Cosco Peterson highchair and pretty hard to find. My google search has landed on one that sold in November on etsy. Lucky me for having a mom who saves stuff! It's made of stainless steel and has a shiny, metal tray. The seat is covered in orange vinyl with flowers and animals scattered across it.

Let's pause for a moment and list the animals represented on this highchair:
Zebra
Moose
Koala Bear
Camel
Ostrich
Yak
Duckbilled Platypus

Seriously, who decided those animals went together? What a random, random group.

Despite the strange assortment from the animal kingdom, G loved it!

My purpose for asking my mom to dig out this relic from my past was not just so G would have somewhere to sit while he ate his veggies. I was planning to take it home with me. Our house isn't very big and we just don't have a good place to fit a huge, plastic highchair. This little chrome beauty takes up much less space and folds flat-ish if it needs to be stashed away somewhere. Plus, it's super cool.

My plan was to recover the seat with some fun fabric. I had seen someone do it once on a blog years ago, so I knew it could work. Adam and I chose some crazy fabric I had in my stash of African cloth. The other crucial element was some clear plastic because, let's be honest, babies are messy eaters. I found clear plastic on rolls at Walmart and surprisingly it was ridiculously cheap.

I was totally insecure in my sewing abilities for this project, so I was glad my mom was there to help. Of course I can't find the blog where I originally saw this project, so we were just making it up as we went. We basically sewed a "pillowcase" for the back and the seat. Then I hot glued (don't look closely) the opening closed and screwed both pieces back onto the frame. Oh, and we found some new webbing for the "seatbelt" part. Adam had the great idea to add a strap between G's legs and I'm so glad we did. This was definitely a trial and error kind of project, but I really like how it turned out.

new webbing, old buckles

And G likes it too!