Headboard Hack

I think it's high time I posted a how-to hack! In an attempt to avoid the temptation of the January sales, I decided to distract myself from sales temptations by implementing a headboard makeover (thus spending the best part of a week covered in paint and thread and therefore barely presentable in my own living room, let alone retail outlets). But I digress.

Before I began, I was left with this:

The previous tenant in my rented room was also a keen interiors-er and had constructed this rather snazzy creation out of some good ol' MDF and an assortment of supportive struts - it houses all my art and craft supplies in pull-out trolleys and even has a section for my boyfriend's clothing (I, of course, have two full wardrobes elsewhere in the room whilst the long-suffering chap has been relegated to a tucked-away rail up top). But the colour wasn't really doing it for me and I longed for a comfy back to rest up against. Plus I'd just inherited some fabulous curtains (a leftover make from a photoshoot) I subsequently customised with slick, chunky black ribbon along the vertical edges, which I was keen to refer to visually elsewhere in the room to help tie the look together.

So I did this:

It's not quite pink enough to upset the boyf but is such a glorious shade it's all I can do to keep from licking it to see if it tastes as good as it looks (I used Designer's Guild Mulberry). By painting the routed lines black, rather than keeping them the same colour, the whole structure really seems to come to life and all its handcrafted joints are lovingly highlighted, plus it echoes the lines of said fab curtains.

For those reading who don't happen to be renting a room from a former interior designer who kindly left handmade MDF structures upon his departure, however, here's a couple of ideas that could be adapted to work in any space:

1. Feature wallpaper stripe.

A quick and easy way to get a shot of colour and pattern into any space. I used some leftovers of this flock-tastic wallpaper from Colefax and Fowler and simply stuck it straight onto the headboard unit using double-sided tape, taking care to pattern-match all five sections required to fill the line. Easy peasy. You could use this method to add a stripe in an alcove, or even stick some to a piece of wood to make bespoke artwork. Still not loving my inherited light fitting but until I'm struck with an ingenious idea for customising that too it'll stay as is.

2. Padded headboard

Another bargain hack (not that I ever do expensive ones, but even still) - through using fabric and upholstery nail strips already in my collection, my only expense was getting a piece of foam cut (which cost around £10 from Pentonville Rubber), which I measured to fill the width of my bedframe and end just shy of the inverted shelf on the headboard unit. I then attached some raspberry silk around the whole foam piece, holding it in place with pins poked through both the foam and fabric.

Then for my feature fabric - a vintage piece of sari fabric I used as a net curtain in a previous flat. After pinning this taut at the back I stitched it straight at the front to hold it in place, before adding my somewhat triumphant finishing touch - upholsterer's nail strip, usually used to trim solid furniture, which I salvaged from a bin (OK, it was a bin at a photoshoot as these were the leftovers from some "proper" upholstering - but a crafty find nonetheless). As luck would have it, by splicing all the leftover bits together I had just enough to cover both sides and it really pulled the whole look together. A simple bit of stitchwork was enough to hold this in place.

And as with the wallpaper, the whole thing is (miraculously, somehow) held in place with some trusty double-sided tape - again, this should also work sticking/leaning the foam directly to a wall, or onto a simple sheet of wood for extra support.

I now sleep far more sweetly basking in the glory of my hack - it also proves to be a much comfier vantage point from which to dream up the multitude of further hacks I have earmarked for the space. I'm getting twitchy fingers just thinking about it...

Repurposing Ideas, Repurposed

Doing my usual internet trawling for design ideas and to avoid the washing-up, I happened upon this article from Real Simple, detailing 14 ideas to repurpose items for a dream-yet-bargainacious wedding. Flicking through, however, many of these ideas are far from nuptually exclusive, and would work for an array of events, dinner parties or just a bit of credit-crunch repurposing fun. Then it occurred to me that I was actually repurposing an article about repurposing and I got rather excited (and a tiny bit smug about the workings of my ingenious little brain). Anyway, do click on the link to peruse in full, or check out the Craft Hacker tidbits below:

1. Use pretty vintage teacups and soup tourines to hold flowers and food nibbles: filling teacups with sugared almonds is great for a wedding, but why not try candy-coloured foil-wrapped chocolates for afternoon tea, skittles or M&M's for a tweenager's party, or - if you're an ambassador and want to really spoil your guests - some Ferrero Rocher to round off your evening soiree in style.


2. Repurposed cake stands - scour charity shops and you can pick up an array of these vintage beauties. Use for holding fun finger foods, or candles - a great idea to stop them dripping onto your tabletop and to allow you to pack more into the same space through clever tiering. My inner Anthea Turner loves the tip also listed about adding a spritz of cooking oil spray onto the area first to allow for easy cleaning of wax drips.

3. Clothespegs as namecard holder - would look very sweet at a rustic summer's barbecue party, or turn up the vintage by substituting for Grandma's old dolly pegs. With either variety, spraypainting would be a quick and easy way to update if the natural wood finish happens to clash with your hordeuvres. For a more masculine affair, a good old bulldog clip would look great teamed with the right placecard, or even a chunky oversized paperclip, bent out of shape to hold the placecard upright.

Bedcrumbs and Tea Parties

Perhaps not the most helpful of notes to self whilst trying to embark on a post-Christmas detox, but the cheery encouragement ‘eat cake in bed’, appliquéd onto a handmade silk dupion cushion, is perhaps one of the best excuses to indulge that I can think of. When it comes to cute Brit company Bedcrumb, though, and their sugar-sweet website boasting itself to be full of ‘self indulgent home accessories’, it would be almost rude not to partake. As well as anti-dietary slogans, their cushion cover range also includes rather delightful, spider-ey scrawled fashion illustrations with characters named Josie and Betsie amongst others (craft hacker kudos for mixing vintage brooches and fabrics in with each original piece). Also of note is the hand-picked mismatched crockery sets, available for singletons (tea for one) to full-on tea party proportions. I’d like to claim the drool patch developing around my chin area was caused purely by the lovelies on this site, though sadly I fear the images of ‘food porn’ (cupcakes) are somewhat responsible too…






Thanks to Decor8 for the tip-off!

If that's whet your appetite for more vintage crockery without the food-based distractions, however, then make your way over to Katie Potts Tea for Two. The aptly-named Potts scours the land to find the most delectable forgotten vintage British china from the 1920's to 1950's, pairing pieces together to make whole new teasets presented in beautiful, reusable hat boxes specially designed for the job. There, forgotten about the cupcakes now? Errrr, no, thought not.

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?

Country Living Christmas Fair 2008

Firstly, apologies: if anyone other than me and Mr Craft Hacker is reading this, I have been exceedingly slack of late and this half-written post has been languishing in my 'edit' pile for some two months now, along with several other exhibition reviews which I hope to post shortly. For the purposes of not having to rewrite my introduction, let's pretend it's early November...

Purveyors of Cath Kidston knock-off vintage-a-rama needn't lose sleep about the credit crunch if the crowds at last week's Country Living Christmas Fair at the Business Design Centre, Islington, are anything to go by. The place was teaming with hoardes of housewives and reluctant husbands escaping the home counties for the day to pick up some festive faux-rustic farmhouse style, recreated in urban central London (a concept that never fails to seem somewhat macabre). Putting aside the numerous Cath-esque stalls and granny-knit cardigans, there were, however, several rather interesting companies on show. Along with some familiar faces, including Jan Constantine (one of the biggest needlepoint success stories, with her range of gorgeous union jack and 'love' cushions), new brands such as Lasso The Moon (see pic below) stood out for all the right reasons, with their beautifully presented selection of original, handcrafted products and eco credentials.

Unsurprisingly, vintage fabrics featured heavily in the work of many exhibitors. Acorn & Will showed a somewhat whimsical collection crafted from vintage fabrics and buttons used to make adorable hairslides and toiletry bags, whilst the highly innovative Refab touted rather funky little doorstops made from recycled fabric offcuts, which are sold 'flat packed' for the owner to fill with rice. Poppy Treffry pimped up her fabrics via the craft of applique, embellishing cutesy designs along a cupcake vibe onto tea cosies and the like, even using her fabric remnamts to make tiny pin badges.
Personalised goods seemed to be a big theme of the day with many companies championing letters and nameplaques as decorative home gifts, the most prolific of these being Jonny's Sister, whose Love Letters are available in an array of pretty paisley and gingham prints, and even in soap form. Dee Puddy added a level of practicality to the trend with these ceramic porcelain labels, which the OCD labeller in me is quite obsessed with (see picture). Stunning ceramics were also to be found at Luna, where gorgeous votives and lights featured a delicate yet streamlined punched letters design. Spell out the name of your beloved or, for the serious crafty romantic, there's always the specially designed 'marry me' votive set (altogether... ahhhhhhhh.)

Strong crafty touches abounded from Bay Design, namely their lovely range of lampshades customised with vintage tape measures and buttons as decorative trim, or hand-painted with sweet Cath Kidston (who else?) style spots. My personal favourite, however, is the ruched shade (see below), created entirely from the same trim laid flat throughout the body of the shade but gathered to create the bottom trim - fab idea for making the most of a ribbon or fabric trim if you don't have a standard trim to finish a job. Further craft big-ups were to be found at Buttonbag, whose fantastic sewing craft kits should be enough to lure mini-hackers away from Guitar Hero long enough to make their own toys and games. Delightfully old-skool, Craft Hacker loves this retro owl family kit, plus the Victorian classic theatre-in-a-box, repackaged for 21st century craftsters.

Illustration proved ever-popular and looked fresh against all the other vintage offerings. Favourites included work by Made in Hastings, a sweet collaborative hailing from, errr, Hastings, with resident illustrators, ceramicists and print designers producing a range of homewares, clothing and children's gifts with a handspun vibe. Jam Tart also featured retro-style line drawings of campervans and Parisian cafe scenes adorning tea towels, oven gloves and ceramics.

An eco shout-out goes in particular to Handcrafted Wood, with its stylish range of (funnily enough) handcrafted wood decorations and gifts, all created from reclaimed wood local to designer Carol Ridler. Also on an eco tip, Dream Acres combines the worlds of crafting and herbs with its pretty scent-filled sleep sacks and pet scent pouches, alongside decorative gifts such as these fabric flowers (see below) - a great idea for reusing old fabric scraps. Finally, cosy on down for winter with the rather lovely collection from John Arbon Textiles - featuring tea cosies and bedsocks handspun from British farmed alpaca wool spun at the regenerated 200 year old Coldharbour Mill in Devon, a smug snuggle is guaranteed.

Craft Hits the Headlines!

As us craftsters already know, craft has been big news for years now - but what with the dreaded credit crunch hitting full swing, my favourite pasttime has been enjoying rather more media attention than usual of late. And for good reason: according to a Google press release out this week, searches for 'sewing classes' are 60% higher than usual as more and more people are attempting a little make-do-and-mend. In London Town, contemporary craft nights have been slowly growing in popularity for some time - from the long-standing Craft Night at the Notting Hill Arts Club to newer kids on the block such as The Make Lounge, whose roster of established craft professionals tutor in anything from making a retro apron to creating your own candles in vintage teacups. And the latest edition of the Sunday Times Style magazine even features a hand-hacked front cover print, to accompany its headline article The Joy of Thrift, which looks in-depth at the fab-sounding new book by writer India Knight, The Thrift Book: Live Well and Spend Less. Broken down into sections, Knight examines how we can all live fabulously for less in terms of eating, beauty and, of course, crafting, with particular big-ups to Craftster.org and Etsy.

Even the multi-nationals are getting in on the act, notably Sony with their latest venture, Little Big Planet. Far be it from me to even pretend to understand the world of computer games, in layman's terms the planet in question is made up of collage-y, crafty layers to create handcrafted worlds inhabited by the rather charming 'sackboy' (a kind of knitted, customisable doll). As part of their press launch over the past week, they have collaborated with the Shoreditch branch of the Women's Institute to create customised sackboy dolls based on female celebrities, and have even been putting on their own free Creative Arts and Crafts workshops at the Thomas Neal's centre in Covent Garden , open to anyone wishing to go down and get involved in some crafting action. These stills below, taken from the game itself, are (almost) enticing enough to encourage me to wrangle the PS3 control out of Mr Craft Hacker's hands and have a go myself.

Cold War Modern at the V&A Museum

With several bags stuffed full of leaflets and brochures to look through still from the London Design Festival, I've decided to leave them aside for a rainy day and carry on blogging about other design topics - but return to them (sooner or later) I shall! Anyway...

My thoughts on the Cold War Modern exhibition at the V&A Museum: I must confess to having numerous gaping holes in my general history knowledge, the Cold War being one of them. After a slightly muddling start to this uber-exhibition, however, I found many of these gaps slotting into place as a deeper understanding of the era, and how this shaped interior and product design, fell into place. To surmise, without getting too history-lesson about it all, the highly competitive spirit between the East and West pushed designers to be more innovative, forward-thinking and resourceful than arguably at any other time during the 20th Century. Designers such as Alex and Peter Smithson, who created the House of the Future exhibition at the Ideal Home Exhibition in 1956, had many crafty, extreme design ideas even by today’s standard (see pic below for one of their room designs).
The concept of a table that retracts electronically into the floor, whilst somewhat snigger-some an idea, is fundamentally a rather clever concept if adapted to a somewhat lower-tech version – what better idea for our 21st century cramped living conditions than a dining table that we can easily convert into a coffee table or even flatten down completely, to suit our immediate requirements?

As is often the case with design launched ahead of its time, many of the more avant-garde ideas never made it past the prototype stage, though many also went on to become enduring design classics, such as Eames’ plastic armchair, revered at the time for its use of polypropylene Of course, political issues came into play – I won’t even attempt to try and explain any of that, though perhaps the artwork of American Interior No.7 by Erro is a rather lovely, decorative way of highlighting the differences and conflicts between both parties.

The exhibition also introduced me to the work of Jiri Kolar, Czech’s master collage artist and one of the founders of froissage (a form of collage using the lines of crumpled up paper to form drawings). As a massive fan of collage and decoupage, I particularly enjoyed his pieces reworking old maps into futuristic landscapes, which simultaneously manage to look old and comforting yet somewhat disconnected and alien. Having come across a map decoupage table by Bombus on the fantastic craft website All Things Original some months ago, this has inspired me further on ways to craft hack old maps.

One of the elements of the exhibition I found most interesting, however, was the way designers gradually came to consider the impact of the work they produced on the environment – far from being the ‘topical’ issue the press would have us believe, eco concerns were catalogued as far back as the 1960’s. To surmise the blurb, designers became concerned with “how to design new technology for the benefit of humanity without producing inhuman effect…how to imagine modern lives outside conditions set by the marketplace”. If only all designers/town planners/manufacturers would heed this manifesto – in the meantime, there’s always craft hacking to fulfil the brief!

…Perhaps now, more than ever, we need design to respond to the current state of the planet in as big and loud a way as any of the innovations to emerge from the Cold War movement.

Cold War Modern runs from 25th September 2008 – 11th January 2009