Two horribly dirty armchairs from the Seventies had a modern make over.
Grey body with brown piping and yellow details on the front.
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Linnéa : Yes, another turquoise chair has been made! This was from the beginning an old school chair without any textiles. I got a vintage paint wax from a good friend in Sweden, that I started to use on all kinds of furnitures .One of them is this chair. Now, I'm making the paint my self and it seems to be working great on wood! And with this beautiful designed textile and the back bejeweled with silver rivets, it became something else than a school chair. A friend found this rocking chair/glider/nursing chair on the street, far away in Bat Yam and gave it to me. It lacked seats and a back rest and probably once it had a gliding stool to accompany it, but not any more. It was huge and I had no idea what to do with it so I asked my guy. He said make something crazy, something that would fit in Alice in Wonderland. Well, that didn't make it easier. So it just stood there in the corner of the room for 6 months - but the cats loved it. Then I went for a visit to Sweden and in an unassuming department store on Christmas Eve I saw this amazing colourful fabric with wild animal heads. It just made me laugh out loud and I knew I had found the solution. I wish I could find the designer of the fabric to give him/her some credit but all research has turned up no clues to where it is from originally. I painted the chair with 5 layers of home made Milk Paint: dark blue, cream, bright red, turquoise and grassy green. Then I distressed it in places to reveal the different layers. This quirky glider has become a favourite of many friends who visit and the cats still fight over who gets to sleep on it. Linnéa : It has been a while since I had the pleasure to redo a furniture. We are about to move house and I have been busy doing a lot of new clothes and accessories to our store - also projects in UndoRedo spirit, but not as fun as furniture. This little piece was a gift from the neighbors. It was broken, boring and ugly but it got a new cute look with a touch of shabby chic and textile of Ralph Lauren! When I moved to this country I dropped everything and for a long while (it took time to get permits etc) I didn't have a job. So living off just my meager savings, half a salary (my partner was a student) and my in laws, we did not have much money to go around. Actually we had no money at all. Unfortunately around this time my partner's friends all started to get married and as the custom here is to give the married couple a check to "start their new life" (and pay for the huge party), we had a problem. We decided that we would create something together (music and art) and give the married couple a gift instead. But the task drowned when the number of married friends became so large that we didn't know where to begin and how to end. Then our friend Sarai found a chair on the street and with no idea on how I should redo it, I took inspiration from her life and made Sarai's Tel Aviv Chair - it became their wedding gift. Shortly thereafter Sarai gave me another chair and I decided to make it into a theme. This chair is for Adi and Michelle. Michelle's favourite colour is orange - thereof the legs. They both love all night parties and India - thereof the "Mandala" created by casual jeans scraps with the trance colours of orange, pink and red. The back rest is also made from jeans cutoffs and shaped after the hexagon pattern on a football (soccer ball) since Adi is a huge fan and a sports journalist. I hope they will enjoy it. At the moment there are 3 other chairs in the process of becoming wedding gifts... Caroline: A little while back I got a slightly odd request. Someone wanted me to attach soft seats to some kitchen chairs. I suggested getting some cushions - you know the type that ties onto the back or legs - but in this case the person wished to have the soft cushions attached to the seats permanently. I met with them and it turned out that because of illness it was hard for them to sit on hard chairs without sliding off. So I understood the need. The person also had a strong wish as to HOW the seats would look and gave me two old cushions that they wished to use as material. The cushions were quite small so I couldn't take the easy way out and wrap the material around the whole seat. Instead I had to devise small seats that were attached and try to hide the staples underneath. After twisting the problem around in my head for a while I figured out how to do it neatly. It took many hours of getting the tiny piece of fabric to fit and hand stitching but in the end it turned out quite nice and comfortable. Here are a few pictures: Linnéa : I got a very interesting job from a Swedish woman. She had a chair that she bought at an auction in Sweden. The Emma chair - which is a baby nursing chair - had it´s breakthrough in the 1840's and this chair is at least 100 years old. She had a piece of fabric called "Teheran", designed by the well known Austrian-Swedish architect and designer Josef Frank (1885-1967). This fabric was designed in the 1940's but it wasn't printed until 1991 by Svenskt Tenn (an interior design company). I started to work on the chair, but I soon realized that the fabric I had been given wouldn't be enough but at least I had what I needed to finish the front of the chair. We agreed that she would bring more fabric from Sweden, when I got the piece for the back of the chair, the material was a little more rough and of course darker (since the first piece had lost colour over the years). But it actually turned out really pretty, even though you can see the difference of the two fabrics. Caroline: This is Yaron's chair which had been covered by a blanket for the past number of years to hide the bland skin coloured fabric of it. After finding a nice colourful curtain from the 70's they asked me if I could reupholster it. Which is ok but just to let everyone know, to use a fabric that is not meant to be used for upholstery of furniture is a little bit tricky. First one must stabilize the fabric by gluing (ironing on) another material called Vlieselin on to the back. This takes along time since the iron has to stand in one spot for at least 30 seconds. So you can imagine the amount of time it takes to do a big piece or curtain with a tiny iron. The second problem is that with the Vlieselin on the back the fabric becomes very rigid, it is not stretchy at all, which makes it very hard to stretch over a chair that is rounded. Therefore one ends up with little creases which are hard to remove. I am hoping that with time that the fabric will shaped itself, but time might just as well make the creases more visible. I will have to wait and see. In the end it turned out quite pretty I think. Caroline: This chair was found on the street by my wonderful friend Sarai, she is an author and writes about Israeli life in Tel Aviv and in India. So what better than a chair about Tel Aviv on pink Indian cotton fabric? Since the chair was beyond restoration - it was splattered with paint and dark oil had penetrated the wood - I had to paint it. I chose another extreme colour to match the already screaming pink. Perhaps I was thinking of the strong colours of India or perhaps I just felt more colourful than bland that day. I embroidered the back rest with a map of northern Tel Aviv, the green outlines are buildings - of where Sarai and her lovely husband Roy live and some of our mutual friends. The 2 thicker lines on the right side is the Ayalon motorway and up top you can see the blue outline of the Yarkon river. The large roundabout is Kikar HaMedina (Square of the Nation) and slightly below it to the left is an empty rectangle which is Kikar Rabin (Rabin Square). Click on a picture below to see larger pictures of the chair before and after. |
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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