Caroline: A gift from the family was so badly smothered with dark dark varnish that the beautiful personality of this set of drawers was lost. I removed the varnish by sanding and the lumpy black paint off the drawer knobs by soaking them in vinegar and I found an amazing oak veneer underneath. I would have kept the oak veneer if it had been possible to get all the old varnish out of the wood grain but that proved impossible without damaging the veneer or using a lot of poisonous paint strippers - which I want to avoid. After undoing I then redid the body with 2 different colours of stain. For the drawers themselves I chose teak (a tropical hardwood) and for the body a black walnut stain which is a dark chocolate brown. I also stained the insides of the drawers and dressed the bottom of the drawers with moss green paper covered by a sheet of thick plastic. These can easily be removed so the drawer can be dusted and the plastic can be cleaned. Very practical and looks elegant in my opinion. I love how one now can see the wood grain through the stain, it looks so much more alive. What do you think? Click on a picture below to see full gallery of before and after photos:
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Linnea: Found a chair on the road, that someone thrown out because of some color stains on the seat . Except from the stains it was in an almost perfect condition. Here you can read about the transformation, step by step: 1. Sandpapered all sides of the seat. 2. Put insulating tape in the desired pattern on the wood. 3. Painted 2 layers of turquoise color and direct after the second layer, I took out the tape. 4. Painted the sides in black stain color + flax oil + vax. 5. Painted 1 layer of glossy varnish as a top coat and my work was finished!! For once the working process was easy and didn't take too long. YES! Linnea: Leather jackets, leather sofas, leather belts, leather shoes are items that you can re-use and make new things from. Some of them I find, some friends find, some I buy cheap in second-hand stores and some are just items that I got tired of or that broke. Here are some of my leather bracelets, when you click on the picture you can read about from where I got the material: Linnea: Some weeks ago I bought three chairs in Kfar Truman, all of them were made around the 60's and in quite bad situation. Today I finished the redoing of my favorite one, a very bad painted wooden chair with loose back and loose legs. At least the bad painting made it very easy for me to take all the color off. From the beginning I really wanted to keep the chair with the original unpainted wood. But there were too many black stains, that I just could not get out. So I decided to try some of Caroline's home made stain color - black of course! And then I chose a beautiful textile designed by Ralph Lauren for the seat It is called "Native Orchid Floral- Batik" . The lower part of the chair's legs, I painted in dark bluish- green.. I am very happy with the result and maybe I will keep this one for my self. If you, who is reading this is interested in knowing what work lays behind
this product, so you are welcome to read about it here : 1. Remove old paint ( this time I was lucky since I could scrape it off with a knife) 2. Get out whatever that is not stuck from its place, like loose legs or back and sandpaper all very good, starting with a ruff paper and finishing with a gentle one. 3. Take out all that is stuck on the ends, can be a little tricky. And if you don´t do this, eventually what you glued back on, will fall off again! 4. Get the old seat out and all the 100 staples and nails........Sand paper all. 5. Glue all the pieces together again and make sure you attached them right - mark before with numbers because you WILL forget which stick is going in which hole. 6. Remove glue from all surfaces. 7. Paint the chair, at least 3 times no matter what paint you are using and remember to sandpaper in between with a fine paper! 8. In my case, I used stain color, 3 layers and after you need some kind of oil to bind the color to the wood and I used cold-pressed flax oil. 9. After 15-20 minutes you have to wipe the chair really good with a cotton rag. 10. Then you will need a furniture wax and I used Beeswax to cover all the wood with and after 15 minutes you have to rub it all in with a cotton cloth, really good! 11. After the chair is real dry, you can move on to the seat.......... but that´s another story and some more hours:-) Linnea: I do not know if this is a good thing to publish since smoking is BAD for you :) but it is undone and redone, so here I go. The price of cigarettes have gone up recently...a lot! So my husband, who is a smoker started to buy tobacco and roll cigarettes himself to save money. For this you need a tobacco pouch or at least it makes polluting your lungs more simple. Since a lot of people have switched to tobacco, there is a big market for pouches and my husband was selling an ok case in his store, but after 2-3 months the fake leather broke. So I decided to try to make a pouch myself, reusing plastic tobacco cases and sew them into real leather that I took from an old leather sofa. The result was quite nice. Each one has a pocket with zipper for the filters and a pocket for rolling paper. It closes with a magnet. Now, this is the only tobacco case we sell in the store. Caroline: This little white cupboard or bedside table was covered in thick white paint. I removed the paint with my heat gun without wearing enough protection. THAT was a bad idea! The cupboard was probably last painted in the 60's and then it was very popular to put lead in paint. So after an hour of removing paint I had to spend 24 hours in bed with nausea and a head ache. I promise I will not do that again! Then I started redoing it, using an old book of poetry in Hebrew by the Israeli poet Tchernichovsky who is apparently considered to be a great poet - although everyone I have asked disagree. Anyhow the pages looked nice. The inside I painted red to match the sewing table and the door and front of the drawer I kept plain with linseed oil and beeswax - just because I felt there was just a bit too much poetry going on. I found red wheels and new knobs and that was that... sort of. I will not tell you the whole story of getting the right varnish by using 4 different products, have one of them explode in my face and another melt 6 layers of old varnish and nearly destroying the poetry and finally finding a Danish floor varnish (Thank you Scandinavia!) that costs a fortune but is just so perfect. That story would be much too long. I actually like this odd little cupboard. I wasn't so sure about it at first, but the next piece of furniture I redo will be normal and classic - I feel like being more plain. Click on a picture below to see gallery of before and after: Caroline: Some time ago I found a tiny wooden table in terrible shape at the flea market. Even though the wood was soaked in oil and layered with 5 layers of thick white paint, oh and a large crack all down the center - I bought it. I wanted something really cheap and not so nice because I wanted to cut the legs off and make it shorter. With a pretty or nicely designed table it would have hurt too much to put a saw to the legs. The reason I want it shorter, is that it will be my sewing table and the normal height of a table make my shoulders and neck hurt after five minutes of sewing. So first of all I had to remove all the paint and sandpaper for hours, then I decided on matching my little red chair. I kept the legs natural and only oiled them with parboiled linseed oil for that smooth satin texture that I love. Then I painted the top and the inside of the drawer red and the edge black just because I like contrast. In the end I decided on giving the table top that glass effect with 8 layers of high gloss varnish, just because I wanted to see if I could do it. I am probably going to regret it big time, since every tiny dust speck shines like a star in a red sky. But for now I am just please that it turned out so well. For a table of such low quality wood and bad shape I think it turned out very cute. I am very sorry I do not have more pictures of the table before the redoing. Check out the gallery of pictures below: Linnea:
After making the first seat cover to the yellow chair, I had some more pom pom´s left over . So I made a new seat of what there was, mixed small and big one´s. When I had finished it , I realized that I needed a stool to put it on. Me and Caroline went on a road trip two weeks ago and found alot of new and fun places of fleemarkets and secondhand stores. One of them was : סבתא מרים - איסוף ומכירת פריטי וינטאג' ( Grandma Miriam ) , where I found a perfect little stool, broken in the middle but easy to fix. And now the yellow has a new blue friend! Linnea: On my spare time, which actually does not exists, I find it interesting and fun to come up with new recycling ideas. My thoughts have been circling around glass bottles. Here in Israel you can give the beer bottles back to the store and get some money for it . But wine bottles, coffee jars and all other glass junk , everybody throw in the regular garbage. There are no glass recycling containers like in Sweden ( I have never seen one anyway ) and it breaks my heart every time I have to throw it in the trash..... In our house we drink a lot of coffee, so it didn't take me so long to save some coffee jars. First I removed the labels and cleaned them from grease. Then I sand papered all the jar, also the top ( using a very fine sandpaper, # 240 ) . After that, I chose a pattern from a crocheted cloth and used spray paint to get the jar a fun pattern. Voilá and now I can reuse them for a long time as a cookie jar or as storage for sugar or what ever you want to put inside! Linnea : Went on a trip today with my family to a new place that Caroline and I found last weekend ( but then it was closed). Outside they had second hand furniture and alot of funny junk and inside only antiques. Before we went, Caroline told me : -Linnéa, just no chairs, ok? And of course she´s right, I already have too many unfinished....well, I came home with only 3 more!? But they are beautiful and inspiring, so I hope she will forgive me;-). |
Linnea & Caroline2 foreigners in Israel trying to find their space. Up-cycling furniture and clothes for a better environment and future. Check us out on Instagram:
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