The Quest For The Deckchair

Now, wouldn’t you think that everyone (or at least everyone’s mum & dad) will have a battered old deckchair lying around at the back of the garden shed? Probably covered in cobwebs, with a bit of tatty fraying striped fabric and a bit of a rotten frame. You would think that, wouldn’t you????…

But no!, when we needed a couple of old deck chairs to work a bit of magic on and make look wonderful in a Lily & Violet Vintage way - we couldn’t find any anywhere!  We got lots of “aw, if I had known you wanted any I wouldn’t have taken those old things to the tip” and “I’m sure we’ve got some old deck chairs lurking at the back of the garage - oh, no, wait a minute, we put them out for the bin man.”

So, Lisa put a request out on Facebook and signed herself up to the local selling sites. Ha ha, now she is inundated with useless stuff for sale all over Gloucestershire - but you never know there might be a rare kind of deckchair in amongst them!  

These sites are probably really very useful and help people to offload their stuff to others - but they also mean that you get 500 notifications of prams for sale… Anyway, that didn’t work and we found no old deckchairs in need of a new home.  And we had no responses to Facebook requests…nada!!

Weston Beach Maybe??

We needed to hit on a new strategy in the quest for the deckchair….. We made a couple of calls to Weston-Super-Mare council and a few others - all to no avail. (Our thinking here was that old deckchairs used on beaches probably get scrapped and so this would be a good source of the not so perfect chair.)  We haven’t totally given up on the beach traders being a likely source of chairs so we have a few beach trips out planned in the next couple of days - all in the name of ‘work’ you understand!! 

With the weather now taking a turn for the better, we are pretty certain that there will be a few sheds and garages being given a once over and all the old garden furniture being replaced with new rattan stuff from Homebase. If this is you, please bear us in mind!! - we need your old deckchairs. (hopefully you have got the message by now).

We are planning to give our old deck chairs (when we find them!) a bit of a overhaul and use them in our caravan photoshoots and in the Lily & Violet Vintage boutique.  We have got some brilliant fabric in mind for them!! Where would you go to buy stripy fabric for your deckchair - yep, of course - www.deckchairstripes.com!!!!! There is a .com for everything!!! They do have some seriously funky fabric - so if you don’t fancy handing over your old deck chairs to us, then get and revamp them yourself!!! 

Ouch - Bruised for weeks!!

I recently took a trip to Cattle Country with Lily and some of our friends.  It was my birthday and so when we sat down for our packed lunch, I was given the pride of place, head of the table seat!!! How lovely!!! - and guess what it was??  Yep, a lovely striped deckchair!!! But unlike the vintage versions it had no fixed seat.  The result - an embarrassed me !!! (well, I would have been if I was the type to get embarrassed!)  Obviously, no one had their camera fixed on me at that particular moment, so the event was recreated (too many times) - and, on grass to save my delicate posterior from the stones (ouch)!! I did cause quite a stir sitting down onto the deckchair and going straight through!!

We have managed to get hold of some ‘spanish chairs’ at Wotton Auctions and for now we are using them as stand-ins for the deckchairs. We don’t really want to resort to buying new ones so are scouring anywhere we can think of for the vintage variety.  If you see any, let us know!!! 

Oh, and if you happen to go to Cattle Country anytime in the near future, be very, very careful of the deckchairs at Barn 2!!!

 Mary & Lisa x