Repurposed

As I've mentioned before, you can get a lot of stuff from the streets in Barcelona.  In fact, the majority of our apartment is furnished from the streets*.  We found this old chest of drawers which had woodworm, which I had to eradicate immediately.  Last week, we were walking and found this volume of books that have the perfect amount of wear and tear.  Our friend Manuela found a shoot of this plant laying in the street and she gave it to us with the instructions to put it in water.  We found this vase in the back of one of our cabinets when we moved in.  It's amazing what can be done with the stuff that no one else wants.

*Check out these blogs for other posts about this: Memory Board, Texas-Shaped Table, Ikea Book Shelf

A Texas-Shaped Table

We took a walk two weeks ago at trash night.  As we were contemplating turning back towards home, we ran across this odd, Texas-shaped table.  Tracy could immediately see potential in it, but I was completely against taking it home.  As soon as we turned to walk away, I changed my mind and we picked it up.  We managed to get it home and not do any damage to it on the way.  We toyed with different ideas on how to utilize it and what to do with it, but after careful analysis, we decided to decoupage it.  Of course, Tracy was completely right about this table's potential. Here is the process.

The Original felt covers, or what was left over after I started taking it apart.  There were 3 layers of felt (2 maroon and one mustardy yellow), full of dust, each individually stapled to the table.  I had to pull hundreds of staples out of every surface of the table, with pliers.  

The Table with the felt cover removed.

After all the staples were removed, the surface of the table was largely destroyed.  There were also half staple sticking up out of the wood, which I could not remove with pliers, so I hammered them back into the table to avoid tetanus scratches. 

Me looking at pictures and pages to cut out.  A couple of the legs had Carcoma (wood worm), so I had to do some injections of Matacarcoma (a clear chemical used to treat wood) before I could start on resurfacing.

What to use, what to use.  So many fun pictorial history books I found late one night while Sadie was going potty.

Getting started

It's always hard to decide where to put my favorite images.

An hour in.

A different angle.

Getting close to finishing...Sadie is bored.

Almost done...just missing a couple edges.

The Final Project

Another Angle of the table.

Thanks to Tracy for taking the great pictures of me hard at work.

Identity…what's that?

Identity. It's who I am.  But who am I?  Over that last two years I have entrenched myself in fundraising and moving to Europe, but I only conceptually knew what that meant.  Now that we're here, the support raising has wound down, we have our residency handled, and an apartment, I don't know what to do.  I wake up in the morning and I don't have that one thing in my day that will make me feel like I've accomplished something.  We have been meeting new friends, and building other relationships and getting into a rhythm.  I personally just feel a need to make something happen, to get down and dirty, to create.
I was speaking with someone the other day about restorative art and all I could think of was making new art out of old, thrown away, street stuff.  We found a chest of drawers and I worked to inject each little woodworm hole with a syringe to kill the infestation.  I did the same with some chairs that we bought cheaply.
The most recent project, though, is taking a very basic IKEA bookshelf that we found on the street and making a sort of collage out of it.  I used pages from books from the 50's - 70's that no longer had covers, just pages (and were destined for the recycle bin), and newspapers from the late 70's. Here is how the project panned out.  I'm not going to do captions because it's self explanatory.  The best part about it, though, is due to the time period of the papers I was using, the bookshelf took a conspiratorial theme.  Good times.