Jamie Ward Upcycled Fly-tip Furniture

Nothing like a bit of fly-tipped furniture hacking to get a girl a bit hot under the collar on a chilly Winter's eve (shouldn't it be spring by now?!) Thanks to today's Daily Candy email alert, I am now fully versed and oh-so-slightly jealous of the creative furniture genius that is Jamie Ward. Not even out of uni yet, this pioneering Manchester-based chap forages for discarded furniture and furniture bits to upcycle into brand-new character-filled pieces. Not content with merely sprucing up an existing find with a bit of paint, he actually splices: a chair seat teamed with stool legs, chair backs combined to form a seat pad and so on. His ideas combine skilled craftsmanship with simpler hacker formats such as decoupage and upholstery. Here's my favourite five:


1. Upcycled window pane table - I love any project that involved recycling original window panes, and personally think anyone who rips out original wooden frames to replace them with UPVC should be locked up for crimes to humanity. A great re-use of a vintage classic.
2. Decoupage 'This Is Manchester' stool - not sure the origins of this piece, though it looks like newspaper photocopies decoupaged over a re-hacked stool, finished in a high gloss varnish. Keeping the colour palette monochrome enhances the classy finish.
3. Red-top stool - great juxtaposition of wooden vintage legs with what looks like a slick formica top - would be a practical choice for a kitchen table hack, too.
4. Stripy Collection - fantastic way to use up leftover paint. A good have-a-go hack - choose a selection of colours to match your interior scheme, and keep the lines handpaintedly jaunty.
5. Wooden chair with customised back: by removing the edge back spindles, a standard design somehow looks somewhere between cutting edge and Art Deco.

Upcycled original pieces diverted from landfill to become functional eye candy - Jamie, Craft Hacker salutes you.

Images and information all courtesy of www.jamiewardfurniture.tk

Haunting Hacks from Ghost Furniture

Happy new year! I trust you had a crafty Christmas? I've been catching up on lots of reading, doing a few craft hacks and generally idea generating, which I tend to be rather good at - it's just the remembering and collating of said ideas that is my downfall. However, rested and buoyed by the numerous press coverage on how craft is going to be THE big story of 2009, I start the blog anew as of....NOW!

I'll be posting a few hacks I've been working on very soon, with some step-by-step instructions, but for now feast your craft-starved eyes on the work of hugely talented duo Di Overton and Harvey Roll over at Ghost Furniture (tagline: "Bringing quality furniture back from the dead and making it hauntingly beautiful.") Whilst I love my 'day job' as an interior stylist, their existence does sound somewhat idyllic - scouring the land for overlooked vintage treasure ripe for their very innovative, often humorous brand of makeover, all created from the belly of their Northumberland workshop. Pieces range from the almost sculptural, such as the Dinner for One table, to more functional objects like the Flapper chair (so-called due to its fabric applique detail, taken from a piece of 1920's loungewear.)

One of my favourite elements of the company is the great detail they go into to describe where each piece originated and how it was created - a complete polar opposite of mass production. Casting my eyes over this sublime collection has certainly inspired me to get working on a coffee table makeover project I've been mulling over for a while now. How about you?

Let's get things started...

I'm going to try and add a few images and links to get things on the road... have no idea how to do this so let's see if I can figure it out...

Anyhoo, I thought I'd begin with a few pictures from my own archives to illustrate some of my own Craft Hacks. As London Design Week 2008 is getting ready to open its doors to a myriad of new design talent, I'm planning to get some images and reviews up here on my favourites, so seems best to add my efforts in now before I'm completely upstaged...

1. Lampshade Jumper : A friend passed on this rather lovely crochet top to me, but it somehow always made me feel a bit 'bulky', and as such spent much of its life languishing at the back of the wardrobe. One evening I was gazing up with annoyance at my previous lampshade, which served no function other than to obscure most of the light in my already rather gloomy bedroom, when inspiration struck. By using the existing framework from my old lampshade, I hand-stitched the top (pre-cut to below the sleeve) to the upper frame, and allowed the original bottom trim of the jumper to form a rather sweet fringing around the bottom framework (also hand-stitched in place). The result is an original lightshade, me no longer leaving the house with blotchy blusher as I can actually see to apply make-up now, and I even have enough remnants left over for a follow-on project. Hurrah!

2. Oriental Fishtank : When Ben, our antipodean housemate, arrived home with a donated tropical aquarium, much excitement was felt around the homestead. However, excitement soon turned into abject distress when I realised that said aquarium was fully integrated into a black ash-effect melamine base unit. A quick rummage through my ever-increasing collection of unused wallpaper samples, however, turned up this little trump card - a stunning, subtle oriental design picked up in trusty B&Q. By simply taking off the door handles, cutting the paper to size and sticking it down with some double-sided tape, the 1980's throwback is transformed into a bijou little home for our aquatic friends.

3. Quaker Oats Tin : A little example of some upcycling - one of my favourite terms and something we should all aspire to do a little more of - in essence, taking something that is disposable and transforming it into something of greater use and value. This mini-project is a fairly simple interpretation of it, inspired by the wonderful tropical gardens seen on a visit to the Eden Project in Cornwall. I love the idea of repurposing items and using them outside of their original intended use. What else could you use as an indoor planter - an old teapot? A milk bottle? Old bean tins, spraypainted or decorated with some fabric offcuts?