I stumbled across Heidi’s Christmas present by accident last year. I was returning to one of my favourite places to waste a Sunday afternoon… The Mill Markets with the intention of buying an old wooden Pinocchio I had spied on my last visit (It was to become another addition to Heidi’s nursery wall). I didn’t buy it the first time because I wasn’t completely certain I liked it. So there I was staring at the Pinocchio, again… still not sure.
I am usually a very quick decision maker, and seldom regret decisions I have made. So, whenever I’m not sure about something I should know by now to walk away. I did end up walking away, and thank goodness for that, or I wouldn’t have stumbled across this gorgeous old rocking horse, at a bargain price of $30!
Many of you are probably thinking how gorgeous the paint-work is, and that it’s bright and fun for a little girl – which I did too. But I wasn’t sold, it needed a little TLC (Tender loving care – who knows what other meaning that could have these days in a teenager’s text message!). Secondly, my husband barracks for West Coast Eagles Aussie rules footy team (Blue and yellow), and I couldn’t have him thinking it was a West Coast rocking horse!
My plan was to sand it back, and repaint it for Heidi’s Christmas present. I also wanted to add a mane and tail.
With Heidi’s nursery having a touch of red, I wanted red to feature in the new colour scheme. I did a lot of searching online and Pinterest for inspiration, and pinned some options onto my Kids pinboard. I decided on a white horse, black saddle/seat and red rocking apparatus (what do you call that part??). As much as I hate painting with enamel paint (it ends up all over me, then I have to wash down with mineral turpentine… and I can’t be bothered with the effort to wash the brushes either… Short answer – I’m Lazy!!!) I did use enamel for this project – it is a much better, shiny finish, and will ensure it survives the beating it is going to get over the years. I gave the horse two coats of paint after a thorough sand-back, and wipe down with a damp cloth.
We now have a beautifully fresh and inviting rocking horse sitting in Heidi’s nursery…
For the mane I chose Black – I bought a string of black tassels from the material shop. The mane is two lengths of tassels so it hangs down both sides…
I attached the mane with a staple gun. If you look closely below you can see the staples holding on the mane, that I then coloured black with a permanent marker.
I added a little detail to the heart at the front of the rocking horse….
I then opted for a curtain tassel for the tail. Here you can see the curtain tassel tail I attached to the underside of the seat/saddle with the staple gun…
After all that effort, I would love to say Heidi was overjoyed to see her new animal friend…Hmmmmm – I’m sure she will grow to like it!
Calling your help, I’m looking for a name for Heidi’s new horse… please send through your fun, quirky and imaginative name suggestions?
It’s official, salvaging furniture from the side of the road and restoring or transforming it is a hereditary trait.
Many months ago I mentioned to Mum that I wanted to replace the bench seats along the side of our dining table with six chairs.
I wanted the change-over to coincide with our move into our new house, but hadn’t seen anything I would be happy to spend money on. Being the thinker that she is, mum suggested that I re-use the chairs she was storing in the garage (my sister was holding on to them for a future use – yet to be determined!). So off we went to the garage to inspect them… they were perfect.
I was later informed by my 86-year-old grandmother that she and my grandfather had found these chairs on the side of the road, took them home and painted them green. They then finished them with special paint (that was apparently all the rage in the 1980′s) that gave them an antique look. This is when I realised that my love for transforming curb-side furniture has been passed down two generations!
Without a second-thought I loaded the chairs into the car, took them home and started to think about what I would do with them:
- Strip the paint off them myself (which I tried to do with one chair and gave-up when there were more than four coats of paint on them!)
- Pay someone to strip them for me (I was hesitant to do this because I didn’t think the quality of the wood would be worth the effort or cost)
- Paint over the multiple coats of paint they had already received.
I decided to paint over them, but what colour? I pondered on this for some time.
I really wanted to go a bright colour (was thinking duck-egg blue), but I knew I would get sick of it after a while… so I decided to paint them the same colour we had chosen as our wall paint. Solver “talc’ in an enamel gloss.
If you have ever painted anything with circular shape: a pole, tube, prong, round table/chair leg you will sympathise with me when I say it was a long, tedious and difficult job. To get the paint to cover the surface evenly was extremely challenging – it took me ages (and three coats on all six chairs). Each chair now has about seven coats of paint from all the transformations they have endured over the years!
Just as well they look wonderful around the table in our new home, or the effort would not have been worth it….
On the wall in this image you will see another project I am working on, burlap covered canvases with butterflies cut from atlas pages and metal – I’m not sure about it, so leaving it there to decide if I change it to birds instead (more about this in a future post).
We’ve found since changing from benches along each side of the table that we use the table more. It is less effort to pull out a chair to sit at the table. The benches were not ideal when entertaining – you couldn’t turn your chair slightly to face the person next to you when talking. All round a successful project, albeit the painting was extremely time-consuming.
I stumbled across this rattan screen about 4 years ago. It was 7.30am, I was driving to work… my attention was drawn to a skip sitting outside a house in our street. Sticking out the top of the skip was a small portion of this rattan screen/room divider – It looked promising! So much so, if stopping to check it out meant I was late to work, it was a risk I was willing to take.
With years of experience under my belt, I would call myself a seasoned collector of junk from the footpath or skips. Even with that label clearly tattooed to my forehead it doesn’t make me feel any more comfortable about fossicking through other people’s junk. This morning was particularly awkward with a spectator sitting on the front porch of the house next door… monitoring my swift stop, reverse, park, inspect, grab and squeeze!
The ‘squeeze’ part of this mission was noteworthy. It probably deserved an audience… somehow I managed to ‘squeeze’ this three panel screen/room divider into my Holden Barina (tiny hatchback)! Where there is a will there is a way. On this occasion I would have broken the record for ‘Screen Squeezing into small cars’ if one actually existed (time was ticking, and I had to get to work). I toyed with the idea of driving 200m down the road and dropping the screen back at home - NO TIME! MUST GET TO WORK - so it traveled with me slid between the two front seats all the way to work, doing what it was designed to do – divide spaces in half!
For several reasons I found the hardest part of this mission luring my husband outside that night to help me retrieve it from the car:
a) I knew he was going to shake his head when he saw how I had positioned it in the car, then taken it to work and back;
b) If not approached correctly he would refuse to help me bring anymore junk into our home;
c) He wouldn’t be able to see the vision I had to transform it, which would make b) a more valid point in his mind!
Obviously the screen made it inside.
To transform it I strategically picked a weekend hubby was away playing golf – there was no room for doubters with this project.
1. The first thing I did was cut off all the woven rattan with a box cutting/Stanley knife. This took a while, and ruined my hands and chipped all my nails. It was very dusty between the rattan – Not a fun job. I was left with three wooden frames joined together with hinges.
2. I then went to the hardware store and purchased some chipboard/MDF to cover one side of each panel. If you take your measurements they will usually cut it to size for you (sometimes they charge a few dollars, often it is free).
3. Using a staple gun (or nails if you don’t have a gun) I attached the chipboard to each panel.
4. I then needed some inspiration to work out what to cover the panels with. I wanted a pattern, probably wallpaper (or material), and something unique. A friend from work told me about an amazing shop North of Melbourne, in Northcote, call Flashback Fabric and Wallpaper. They stock brilliant vintage wallpaper and fabric (as the name suggests!). When I visited I was confronted with the metallic, large floral wallpaper mum and dad had in their bathroom 30 years ago - that was a real ‘flashback’ for me!
I chose a gold and white pattern, detailed, but subtle colours…
Being a vintage wallpaper I needed some wallpaper glue to adhere it to the panels. I cut it down almost to size (leaving about 1 inch around the edges to hold onto, then using the box cutting knife trimed the excess around the edges after the glue had dried). It came up a treat!
I chose to leave the wood frame exposed on the back and sides, I was after a rustic look. Another option would have been to cover the back panels and/or paint them for a neater finish.
Next time you see an old screen, don’t write-it-off…. with a little imagination, and a bit of work you can have yourself a gorgeous and extremely unique room divider.
We inherited a hideous orange coloured wooden chest of drawers when my grandmother moved into a nursing home. It didn’t go with our decor at all, but was sturdy, and the drawers were large, and we needed the extra storage space. I couldn’t let it last a week in my house looking like that, so I painted it white immediately (using a gloss acrylic paint).
It has been a wonderful additional storage unit for a good 3 years year now.
Its usefulness is now being extended … it has been turned into a clothes drawers for the baby’s nursery. Being all white was a little boring, so I decided to jazz it up a little by adding some wallpaper on the front of the top drawers. The wallpaper I used was a donation from Mum about a year ago (I wrote about it in a previous post), I had not found the right use for it until now. This wallpaper was used in a room renovation in my first childhood home – about 40 years (and 4 house moves) ago! It was only fitting to see it re-used for the arrival of the next generation in our family.
It’s really quite simple to cover the drawers with wallpaper – her’s what I did:
Take the drawers you want to cover and remove the knobs (you may need a screw driver to loosen the screw from the inside of the drawer.
Measure the dimensions of the area you are covering (the area I covered was the flat surface that started just inside the edge of each drawer). Each drawer could have slightly different measurements, so check this.
Mark the dimensions of the area you want to cover onto the back of the wallpaper (make sure you are aware of which part of the wallpaper pattern you will be cutting out (some parts are more interesting than others), and that it is facing the right way. Also think about if you want the pattern to flow through continuously to each drawer – if so, you will need to position the measurements next to each other so does this)
Cut out the pieces of wall paper neatly. Place then on the drawer to check that they are the right size (before sticking).
Decide which piece of wallpaper is to go on which drawer (you will also need to check which drawer is placed in which position in the chest of drawers – I discovered there was a certain location for each drawer – so if you want your wallpaper pattern to be continuous it is important to know this now!)
Use craft glue to cover the back of each piece of wallpaper evenly (if the glue is not covering all the wallpaper you will increase the chance of bubbles or wrinkles as it dries). You can use a paint brush to aid in spreading the glue.
Stick the wallpaper onto the front of each drawer, running a ruler over each one to smooth out any wrinkles or bubbles. Allow to dry.
When dry you can use a knitting needle/pen etc to poke a hole through the wallpaper to allow the knob screw to go back into place.
Screw the knobs back on (be careful that when screwing the knob on tightly that it doesn’t tear the wallpaper.
You don’t have to use wallpaper, you could even use material – I just happened to have some, and wallpaper tends to be wide enough for these uses. Be imaginative and use anything you like – you could even collage the front with old book pages, magazines – be adventurous!
I recently introduced my mother-in-law to eBay…. she loved it! We went searching for a bassinet (with a little bit of character) for the baby. I really liked the older style cane bassinets, and eBay delivered (it also happened to be located about 30 minutes from my Mother-in-law’s house). We placed our highest bid a $50 – and won the auction! We were both over the moon.
They were only selling the bassinet, on a stand with wheels – no mattress or sheets etc. So we then had to hunt down a mattress that would fit, and some sheets. My husband also gave it a freshen-up with a can of white spray paint (I wasn’t allowed to use the spray paint being pregnant. It was a miracle I was able to keep my nose out of that part of the transformation!).
My mother in law sourced the mattress and protector, and one set of sheets. I decided to spend my ‘waiting’ time before the baby arrived making the other sheets (fitted and flat) for my newly acquired bassinet, and cot. Why make them when I can by them? I hadn’t seen any sheets I had liked, they were all too busy or too expensive for what you are buying!
You can imagine my excitement when mum asked me if I wanted any of the beautiful, white, top quality, 100% cotton, single bed sheets she had in her cupboard. They were my grandmothers, and had been sitting in mum’s cupboard since she moved into a nursing home several years ago. They were a really thick cotton sheet (great for soaking up baby vomit, wee and poo!), and in excellent condition. Of course I said yes to her offer, and returned home with a bag full of material to transform into sheets.
To Make a Flat sheet
The sheets I was given were flat, single sheets. Each were finished properly (folded and sewn) on one of the short ends, and finished as part of the weave on the long edges. To minimise the amount of sewing I needed to do I made the most of this and used these finished edges where I could on 2 sides of my flat sheets. I used the folded and sewn end as my fold-over part of the sheet that would be at the baby’s head.
Use one of your bassinet or cot sheets to determine the size you need to cut your material, leaving about 3cm to properly finish the edges on the 2 sides that you are cutting.
Once you have cut your sheet size, take some pins and pin the edges ready to sew. Make sure you fold over the edge about 1cm, then fold it over again – that way you don’t expose the raw edge of the material, and it won’t fray when you wash it – it also looks neater. Sew down both sides to finish your sheet.
Note: Make sure that you fold both sheet edges over onto the ‘wrong’ side of the sheet – so you have a good side and bad side.
Now for the decorative part. I have used two different materials to decorate my sheets – ribbon and material. The green, silk ribbon was from a roll mum found in her cupboard, it probably belonged to one of our grandparents. The red and white, cotton, striped, seersucker I bought.
I ironed on some interfacing to the back of both materials to give them a little more structure, and help them hold their shape after washing. Cut the interfacing just slightly smaller than the material so it doesn’t hang over the edge.
Pin the material/ribbon just below the folded and sewn edge that runs along the top end of the sheet, on the good side of the sheet (where the baby’s head will be), allowing some sheet to be seen, and sew into place using cotton of a similar colour to the material (I used green for the ribbon, and white for the red and white striped material).
Note: When using material to decorate the sheet, use the iron to fold under the edge of the material about 1cm, so it is finished properly when you sew it onto the sheet. You will also need to do this for the ribbon at both ends (where you have cut it).
To make the Fitted sheet
Take the fitted sheet you have bought and use it to gauge how much material you will need (by measuring it). If you haven’t bought one, then you will need to measure your mattress (Bassinet or Cot). Measure the basic dimensions down both sides, then the depth. You will need to mark onto the material the basic dimensions, then add on the depth of the mattress on each side… plus another 5cm to hem around it.
If you want the sheet to fit better you can cut a triangle out of the material at each corner, then sew the cut edges together at each corner before you hem the material. The sheet will then fit more snugly around each corner of the mattress.
However, if you want to keep it simple, you don’t need to take in the corners for a better fit. Simply round off the edges (with scissors), and hem around the material. To hem it, fold over the material once (about 2cm) then again. You want to allow enough room in the hem to thread a piece of elastic.
Note: Make sure you leave a gap when you are hemming the sheet, as you will need to be able to feed your elastic around the edge of the sheet, within the tube you have created.
To thread the elastic around the sheet you will need a safety pin. Attach the safety pin to the end of the elastic (tip: fold the elastic over so it is doubled up when you attach the pin, otherwise it will fray as you are threading, and the pin will separate from the elastic – speaking from experience!). Slowly feed the safety pin around the edge of the sheet (through the tube you created when hemming the sheet), allowing the elastic to feed through with it.
Note: Make sure you hold onto the end of the elastic, ensuring it doesn’t disappear into the tube while you are feeding it through.
Once you have fed the elastic all the way through, work out how much elastic you need to use by stretching the sheet out and seeing what works best (Holding the elastic tightly while you do this!). Once determined, cut the elastic, and sew it together, or tie a knot to secure it. You can then sew over the opening where you thread the elastic through, to finish it off neatly
There you have it – Up-cycled bassinet and cot sheets. Doing your bit for the environment, and saving yourself some money at the same time.
My husband and I were driving home after a lazy Sunday breakfast when he was hit with ‘Stop, reverse the car!’.
I had spotted 2 potential outdoor chairs (which we needed to complete our new deck). These chairs were sitting on the footpath (hard rubbish for anyone interested), about 30m down a side street we were driving past at 60km an hour…. I have a finely tuned sense of judgement when it comes to assessing junk placed on the footpath. I can usually determined at any speed if it is worth stopping and going back… and these were worth going back for!
They were not in very good condition, weather damaged, stain/varnish wearing off, screws falling out – but the potential was there, I could see it (lucky for me, so could my husband… because I was about to ask him to open the boot of his car so we could squeeze them in the back to take home).
Because of their size we had to make two trips (cleverly hiding the second one out of sight incase it was taken by someone whilst we were gone – you can imagine my devastation if that was to happen – they’d be tears!).
I was thrilled, I had two chairs with lots of potential, with no monetary outlay required (yet!). I just had a little work to do to make them look beautiful.
So, I started sanding with the electric hand sander. This was fairly straight forward until I hit the turned pieces of wood supporting the arms, and the front legs – they were a little more challenging.
As you can see they came up really well sanded.
I then gave them both a good scrub down with a wood cleaner – this removes any wood mould and grey colour on the arms (from the weather).
I had to inject a little bit of liquid nails into some of the joints – to stop the wobbles. Now they were ready to be ‘dressed’.
Choosing a colour to finish the chairs was challenging. Did I want to paint them white, the same colour as the house (eggshell), or allow the natural colour of the wood and grain show through.
I decided to stain them with an external deck stain called charcoal, which will allow the natural wood to be seen underneath – it will also go really well with the black and white fat striped cushions I have already picked out for the chairs.
I did 2 coats of the stain, to give the chairs more than just a rumor of the charcoal colour (don’t you just love that word ‘rumor’ – my husband used it the other day when describing how to best make garlic pizza ‘it requires more than just a rumor of garlic’ is how he best described it).
I can’t describe the satisfaction I get from transforming something… if you don’t mind putting in a little elbow grease, it is truly rewarding to restore something yourself …
Anyone want to join me for a G & T whilst lounging on the deck in my new chairs?
I stumbled across Heidi’s Christmas present by accident last year. I was returning to one of my favourite places to waste a Sunday afternoon… The Mill Markets with the intention of buying an old wooden Pinocchio I had spied on my last visit (It was to become another addition to Heidi’s nursery wall). I didn’t buy it the first time because I wasn’t completely certain I liked it. So there I was staring at the Pinocchio, again… still not sure.
