Upcycle furniture, floor and fashion

‘Up-cycling' Is a word that I loathe but the concept appeals to me. 'Up-cycling' or 'creative reuse' as I understand it is to adapt an existing item and customise it to benefit my purpose and style...often for a relatively small financial outlay. I dislike chucking things away when they can be 'repurposed'...another horrid word.

Our attic guest room is full of recycled, repurposed and up-cycled pieces. The floor mat used to be one of my paintings; I no longer wanted it on the wall and was ferrying it between attic and garage depending on the available storage space in either location. I cut it from its frame and coated both sides of the canvas with emulsion paint, I decorated it with stencilled coach lines then added several coats of acrylic varnish; the varnish makes the painted canvas hard wearing and easy to clean. Also, it adds weight so that the mat does not slip under foot. The creative reuse of this piece means that it is being enjoyed rather than travelling between storage places. I must stress this was one of my paintings not an old master. An old roller blind has made a suitable floor cloth in the past by using the same varnish and paint technique.

A veneer table was ruined when one of our work experience students rested a hot iron on it. The damage was beyond repair so the table was filled, painted white then stencilled with Willow Pattern motifs from The Stencil Library's range of stencils for furniture. It now sits under a large mirror that we gilded with an imitation gold leaf called Dutch Metal. The colours featured on the stencilled wall were reused to paint large tin boxes which became useful lamp tables with storage. With the exception of the mahogany table all items were given a more glamorous reincarnation than they had in their previous life.

When redecorating the attic bedroom I used Anne Sloan Chalk Paint on the walls, the floor cloth, the tin boxes, the iron beds and both the tables. The Chalk Paint gripped to all the different surfaces making them easy to cover. The use of paint gives infinite possibilities for mixing and matching colour and a piece of furniture can be further updated by changing knobs and handles or adding trim.

I saw this chest of drawers in a skip at our local charity shop but it looked nothing like this when I found it. The wood was warped and split. I thought that it was too damaged for me to restore or even paint but I liked the dimensions of it and the shape of its feet. My solution to revive the chest was to have glass cut to fit all the facings and new handles were sourced. Bombay Duck, Anthropologie and Chloe Alberry are good places to look for these. I stencilled each piece of glass on the reverse side, applied aluminium leaf on top of the stencilling and burnished it to a mirror finish. Aluminium leaf gives a soft mirror finish similar to silver leaf but does not tarnish.The decorated glass was then fixed to the drawers with screws. The stencil work and leaf are protected behind the glass. The result is unique, it was not a cheap solution but it has given me a lot of pleasure. My intention was to sell the piece in our shop, but decided that I wouldn’t part with it and decorated a guest room around it instead. I now teach this gilding on glass technique at our workshops.

The chandelier is made from a broken beaded curtain.

The chair was glued, re-covered in fabric, painted, waxed and stencilled in an afternoon. It was stencilled with oil sticks and the pattern of GMT54 Pomegranates matches the fabric.

Some of my other up-cycling projects include clothing; curry spices staining a white linen shirt might no longer be a disaster if you can apply painted decoration over the offending spillage. The same goes for cushion covers, table cloths and curtains.

This sisal matting floor got so badly stained one year that I was going to have to replace it. Rather than throwing it away I thought I would see if an allover stencil pattern might save it. I applied a the GMT43 damask pattern stencil to it using paint and stencil brush; this camouflaged the evidence of chocolate cake and red wine. Some of our 'up-cycled' transformations are given further exposure under the 'Projects' section of this blog...and I am sure that we will bring more to you in the future.

Helen.

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