Reupholstery Project, part one

I have become obsessed with a reupholstering project.  Long story short: I acquired four expensive ($250 each) Italian dining room chairs—more or less through a break-up.  They are sturdy, excellent chairs with chromium-plated metal frames.  They're structurally brilliant with elegant lines—and they're cat wasted.  Cat's don't know a five dollar scratch pad from a two hundred and fifty dollar designer chair.  Such is what happens when scratching posts don't match your decor.  There is more to this. 

   
Today the svelte Ehu accompanied me on a fabric hunting trip.  "Hunting" is the right AND the wrong word to use here: right because it's so right, and wrong because we didn't do any hunting.  We had one destination and we went there in a roundabout way.  It's not like we waited in a tree-stand all night for a six-point buck.  It was more like, "Six-point buck on a shelf in Turner's Falls!  Go there with your rifle and shoot it down."  And so I aimed my wallet at the bottom two sheets of fabric pictured above.  I'd had my wallet pointed at some other fabrics, but Ehu rolled her eyes way back into her head and I conceded rapidly.  (Who wants to shoot down a garden gnome?)  Ah, but the trophy game is still amiss: Why has this become a do-or-die reupholstering project? The fabrics, again, from a slightly different angle. 

The answer is that I have allowed this reupholstering project to assume tantamount symbolic gravity.  I cannot replace these chairs with a credit card.  I simply cannot bank-roll new furniture—sorry—but I can call upon my own resources (my friends), and for the price of one teardrop my vision can produce four stunningly original dining room chairs such as cannot be purchased in any catalog in our solar system ever.  These chairs  are cast-offs from the same place I am cast off from.  We are kindred space travelers.  My future is on a fucking chair.