Reborn chest of drawers

I am a member of freecycle and love to regularly browse the emails that get sent to me by people offering bits and bobs that they no longer want or need for free (check it out! uk.freecycle.org)

I recently acquired a lovely old chest of drawers through freecycle. As soon as I had collected it - with the help of Jim and the guy getting rid of it to get it in the car with all the seats folded down - and then struggled with Jim to get it up the stairs to our flat, I realised I may have not thought about the consequences of it being quite so large...

Nevertheless, we found a home for it in the corner of the living room under the telly:

I considered keeping it stained dark for a brief period, but it was in such a run down condition it needed sanding anyway and then redoing, which would have been a fair chunk of work. I set out with the intention of sanding it down and then seeing what it looked like before deciding to restain or varnish it. I took off the brass handles and put them to one side, discovering that one of the screws from one of the handles was missing in the process...I have been scouring eBay ever since to find a reasonable matching set!

Using an electric sander and some sandpaper in a few different levels of coarseness, Jim and I sanded the whole chest of drawers over the course of a couple of sunny Saturday mornings. I then wiped it down with a damp cloth.

 

This is what it now looks like. I love the natural colour and patterns within the wood, and aside from the lack of handles, I am very pleased and plan on leaving it like this. Just for protection I polished the top of the chest of drawers with wax polish to keep it from scratches and marks.

Applique, patterned circular cushion

A few years ago I realised that the doodles I had been drawing in lectures while at university and in various office meetings all had a tendancy to be circular patterns that repeated out from a centre point. I don't know what this means from a psychological point of view, but when it came to thinking up an idea for a cushion cover design for a friend's birthday present, I had a whole wealth of mini designs to draw on (yes, I kept some doodles on scraps of paper - I don't know why).

 

I began by sketching out a circular pattern on paper to see how well the shapes would fit together keeping them as simple, but as striking, as possible. Next, I drew and cut out some sturdier cardboard templates of the three main shapes that would make up the repeating pattern and used them to cut out several of each shape in different coloured fabrics.

 

I pinned the shapes onto a piece of plain cotton to form the main cover. With a rough idea of the size of the pattern, I bought a round cushion pad, and then cut round the shapes on the fabric to the size of the cushion and cut one other piece the same size for the back of the cover, leaving about 2 inches round each edge for the hem. (Unfortunately, it turned out that the cover needed to be smaller than I'd originally anticipated in order to make the cushion inside fit in a nice, padded way, so I had to remove the outer two rings of shapes...)

Using blanket stitch, I sewed each shape in place onto the fabric by hand. Then I pinned the front and back parts of the cover together face to face and sewed them together with the sewing machine, leaving a gap of about 20cm to fit the cushion into when it was turned the right way out.

Finally, I squeezed the cushion pad into the cover and sewed up the remaining gap by hand.

And there you have one slightly wonky, circular, patterned cushion!

Summery duvet cover

With all the greay rainy weather we've had this summer, I've had a fair bit of time to get stuck into some indoor projects, including sewing a new duvet cover and matching cushion covers.

The fabric shop round the corner were selling this fabric at a ridiculous price (I think it was about £2 a metre) so I couldn't say no really, and I'd bought the remnants of the roll before I even knew what I was going to do with it.

I measured the length of one of our other duvet covers and realised that although I had more than enough in length, the width of the fabric wasn't wide enough to match the width of the duvet cover. So, I measured the difference, divided it by two and cut two strips to add down each side to make up the width on both the front and back of the cover.

I pinned all sections together face to face (inside out) on the top ad both sides of the cover, making sure that the main underside bit of fabric was slightly longer than all other sections in order to sew it folded back on itself as pocket to hold the duvet inside. I haven't decided whether I'm going to attach buttons yet.

For the cushions, I measured the cover cases I already had, folded the remaining material into quarters, pinned them all together, measured out the cover dimensions (including 1.5cm extra for the seam) and marked them on the underside of the material with a pencil.

Then I carefully cut out the four rectangles, pinned two sections together face to face, and used the sewing machine to sew the two long and one of the short sides, before turning the covers the right way out. I then folded in about 5cm of the remining ends, pinned them and inserting the cushions.

With the cushion pads in, I then pinned the fourth ends closed, and used a simple stitch to sew them closed.

First foray into furniture rejuvination

Our neighbours over the road have been doing up their flat with extreme commitment and devotion over the past couple of weeks. Yes, I have been spying on them from our first floor flat living room window.

It all began when I noticed the couple knocking down the lovely, old, metal railing fence around their front garden, and replacing it with a wooden picket fence, which they proceeded to paint baby blue (gasp). Yes, baby blue. At first I was horrified, but they have since colour co-ordinated their front door and added some lovely little windowsill faux bushes in pretty white pots and I can now say, peering judgementally from our living room window, that it looks quite quaint (and much more adventurous than our pair of window boxes, packed with dead, dying, and general reject plants from Homebase).

On one spying occasion I noticed them removing a large collection of furniture, old plants, pictures and upholstery from their flat and leaving it on the pavement as rubbish. Having the thrifty, "waste not want not", "make do and mend" attitude that I do, I scurried downstairs and across the road to see what I could salvage. With the help of Jim - who mostly does always have better things to do, but I asked nicely - we managed to sneakily rescue an old home-made coffee table and a large, heavy, eclectic gold and red wooden mirror:

Both items had seen better days, and were painted/ stained in dark dreary colours, that would do nothing for our tiny, shoebox flat (apart from the mirror which generally will be quite good at splashing light around and making the living room seem a tad larger!)

I set to work washing the mirror and table down with some mildly soapy water and an old sponge to get rid of dust and dirt, and used an old knife to get trickier marks off, and then let them dry completely. It might have been sensible to sand down the furniture a bit, but I thought as it is not going to be used outside and none of it was varnished, a few layers of fresh paint would stick well enough to the exsiting paint.

There was a small selection of paint pots left in the flat when we moved in nearly three years ago, none of which has had a chance to be used until now. I picked a fairly safe looking Dulux pot in "Egyptian Cotton" and prised the lid off with a screw driver expecting to find algae and frogspawn inside, but with a quick stir the paint looked as good as new.

I gave the table and mirror three coats of the Egyptian Cotton each, lettign each layer dry completely (over night) before applying the next.

When finished and all dry, I was more pleased with the resulting white/cream colour of the paint on the furniture than the yellowy white colour that the paint pot depicted. Also, the carving on the mirror frame was still visible under three layers of paint, which I had been worried about disappearing.

I had fun playing around with the position of the table, which goes well with the neutral and pale scheme of our living room, but I have yet to find a home for the mirror as we already have at least one large mirror in every room!

Happy painting!

Large stripey cushion cover

I made this cover a good few months ago, but never got round to adding it as a post to the blog.

 

I had found myself with a rather large, bare cushion and some stripey material that I picked up cheaply on a recent trip to Ikea, which had not yet found a use, other than occasionally adorning the side of the sofa with the nail varnish spill on...

After some umm-ing and ahh-ing and a bit of tape-measuring, a handy, zippable cushion cover was born.

All I did was...






Measure and cut out two squares of fabric 1-2 inches bigger than the square cushion all the way around.





I then gathered my tools (pins, needle, thread, sewing machine, scissors) and began pinning the two squares of fabric together, face to face, along three edges. I left the fourth edge open in order to attach a zip later on and turn the cushion cover the right way out eventually.

With the fabric still inside out (two pieces pinned face to face) I sewed along each of the three pinned sides with a sewing machine.

When all three sides were stitched, I folded back the fourth edges by about an inch and pinned them to make the hems for the zip to be sewn on to. I pinned the zip (about an inch shorter than the length of the cushion) to both sides of the top egde to the inside of the hems (now on the outside of the fabric, as it the cover is still inside out). Unzipping the zip at this point makes this easier.

 
When pinned in place, I sewed along each underside of the zip (the bit you don't see when the zip is done up). Where the zip didn't reach to the ends of the edge of the cushion cover, I turned the cover out the right way, and sewed the two sides of the cover together at each end of the zip, by hand, making sure that I sewed right up to where the zip started and finished, at each end, to give a neater finish.

In full swing on the sofa...!