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 : Last week I got an assignment to make a camera belt for a photographer. I took the measurements from the old belt but the rest was for me to decide and design.

The length of the belt was 120 cm! So I used the leather of a pair of old but unused leather pants.  I wasn't sure about how it would go but I am really happy with result and I think the camera guy will be too.

Caroline:
I got this chair for next to nothing in a terrible condition - painted white and without seats - from a student who wanted to get some extra cash. The chair had bite marks all over the legs from a smaller dog and one armrest had been fastened into place with a large nail right through the top.
I used a heat gun to get most of the thick paint off and sanded it down, to get the paint out of the bite marks I actually sat with a small pin needle and chiseled it out with huge patience. It was utterly boring and many days I wanted to give up and leave little flecks of white paint here and there. But I didn't and now this is my favorite armchair. I kept the large nail through the armrest as a reminder of its past and I patched up the bite marks a bit, but also here I wanted to keep a bit of history on one leg.
The seats I recycled from an old no longer existent couch that I had found in a friends attic.

The little stool I bought at the flea market. Someone had literally staple gunned an ordinary pillow to make a seat for it. I built it up from scratch and glued a large crack running down one leg. I stained it and dressed it to match the armchair.

Many have seen the resemblance of these kind of chairs and the 1960s Danish styled furniture. I have been told that at the time carpenters in Israel actually just copied or borrowed ideas straight out of Danish furniture catalogs since it was nearly impossible or extremely expensive to import these kinds of items.

Please click on one picture below to see the gallery of before and after pictures.

This a a reproduction bar on wheels made in the 80s, that I was asked to cover with decoupage of my choice.

The couple who own it travel quite a bit and I chose to use that as an inspiration. I asked them which cities they had visited together and the area where they had stayed. Then I took street maps of the cities and designed them in three tones white (streets), grey (buildings) and blue (water). These maps I merged together in what (from a distance) looks like one large city with a river running through it. The cities in the map are: Paris, Bangkok, Athens, Berlin - Kreuzberg, Barcelona, Cape Town, Florence, Hong Kong, Jerusalem, Rome, Bologna and Verona

For the bottom shelf of the bar I got inspiration from my sister who suggested that I should use the maps of the international airport terminals in the above mentioned countries. I made outlines of the terminals in black and white (in Photoshop)  and just positioned them in a sort Tetris pattern.

I painted the legs and wheels blue-grey to suit the interior style of the room that the bar would live in.

Detailed pictures of the process are found below in the gallery. I am not adding captions at the moment since I've found that it messes up the pictures if viewed on a mobile phone. So I will let the pictures speak for themselves:

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...

Linnéa : I make a lot of leather things to sell in the store, made out of old jackets, shoes and pants.  I would never buy a new leather jacket but I don't see any reason to throw away an old one, when you can re-use it for other things. At least the animal didn't die for just one person's vanity.

Caroline:
This was a commissioned job, to reupholster 2 stools from the beginning of the last century. The clients had an old curtain from the 70's that they wanted me to use and it turned out great.

Click on a picture in the gallery below to get  details of each step of the transformation from brown, dirty corduroy stools that melted into the background, to happy colourful stools that make a statement.

Thank you Yaron for taking the beautiful 'after' pictures and thank you Khaleesi for posing so nicely!

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:
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.