DIY Archives - Page 15 of 16

Lampshade and lamp cords: Have you ever used spray-on fabric dye?

I’d only used it once before. I needed to dye just the white pique cotton cutwork cuffs and collar of a black maid uniform I bought at the San Francisco uniform store red, for a “Servant of The Devil” costume. It worked pretty well in red. So I got some in blue and used it for a lampshade!

I’d waited a year, constantly surveying prices, ’til I found a deal and bought this beautiful chandelier for the hallway. Then i found it wasvery out of scale for even our huge hall. But it was perfect for the enormous salon.

I still wanted the style for the hallway, though, to help sell its Alice theme. So I found a smaller model (Butler’s 30% off coupon- only a couple times a year, but I’m insanely patient!).

Unfortunately the smaller model had one white shade, and white cords.

Unacceptable!

I sprayed the lampshade in the sink and the cords on a turquoise towel. It worked pretty well- the white fixture got faintly blue, which I probably could have removed with a solvent, but twelve feet up in the dark hall, it was good enough for me.

You can set the dye with heat, either in an oven or by ironing; since neither of those was an option I used a blow dryer and hoped. James didn’t get blue hands when he hung it up, so I assume the dye is sufficiently set. It rinsed out of the sink with just a little bleach.

More furniture: gel stain on raw wood.

We have a place to put coats at last. This wardrobe was my first time using gel stain on raw wood. And as wonderful as it is on already stained surfaces, it’s a thousand times better on raw. It doesn’t raise the grain of the wood. You don’t have to sand between coats.

It’s almost aggressively nontoxic. You can put it on with a foam roller- the secret is to roll it on, then immediately drag the roller over the rolled area to smooth the finish. As a product, it’s highly mistake-tolerant. If you accidentally leave a thick rope of glopped-on stain, you can sand it and re-stain the same day. If you wipe it over an area of raw wood you didn’t mean to cover, you can wipe it off back off so it’s nearly undetectable.

Gel stain is an incredible product for someone like me, who does projects at breakneck speed and is also highly mistake-tolerant.

I assembled and stained another Amazon-score dresser for our hallway, on the left- looks good, right? Gel stain, I’m tellin ya.

I remember spending hours in my mom’s backyard in my early twenties, using tradional stain and shellac, staining and sanding and staining and staining and sanding the cage for my first iguanas. It was horrible. I became intensely stain-phobic.

But now I’ll stain anything. Keep an eye on your dog around me.

My DIY modus is predicated on the 3 Laws of TV News:

Get it Done
Get it Right
Make it Interesting

I learned them from a CNN reporter when I was a courtroom artist, and have since applied them to many things. Particularly to the next project:

My Passementerie Obsession and my glue gun love affair.

What is passementerie? It’s French for dust-catching textile! Ha ha no. Here is what it is.

I love adding trim to things; I will add trim to anything (see: keep an eye on your dog, above). The fastest and most effective way to do this to upholstered furniture is with a glue gun.

I had trimmed a lot of the furniture in my house in Berkeley in burgundy (burgundy is the goth khaki) bullion fringe to match the bullion fringe on my window treatments. It helped bring together the disparate thrift-shop and craigslist pieces while adding Victorian detail.

We left all that furniture behind in Oakland, including one piece I hadn’t planned to leave.

Tragically, I had to leave my pink model chair behind.

The terrible night of the shipping container loading, when for the last few hours Slim and I were alone in the dark trying to get everything in, it didn’t fit.

Although it was just a crappy yardsale 80s dusty mauve wing chair with twenty bucks worth of trim, it had appeared in a dozen or more paintings and I loved it. I had to ditch it outside the Hayward Salvation Army the next day, and I’m still grieving it.

So I was determined to get a new pink model chair.

The one you see here was also stalked online for over a year, ’til the magic 30% Butlers coupon. The blue armchair and little bench I got earlier, with a 40% off BonPrix coupon! Subscribing to email newsletters and the patience to open every single one so your spam filter doesn’t start grabbing them, my dudes.

I got the trims from UK eBay, another thing Brexit will ruin.

So mostly furniture this month for making-stuff, besides Horribella, except this little frame I made for a dollar-store lenticular picture.

In honor of National Week of Making, proclaimed by Obama!

I don’t love order so much as I hate chaos.

Our apartment came with an enormous kitchen. An enormous, empty kitchen.

Like most Berlin apartments, it had no sink, stove, fridge, cabinets or counters. Just pipes sticking out of the wall. We bought an initial basic kitchen setup through a very kind gift from D’s grandfather.

I designed the overall kitchen wall, figured out what the minimum to start was, had the IKEA cabinets delivered and built them. Then a handyman named Tyler helped me install them.

That was only the beginning. I had never thought about combining kitchen & office & craft room, but the minute I did I was sold 100%.

So I came up with the idea of making the other big empty wall my workshop/machine room. Here’s the first rough iteration, made in November.

Normally, the tools and appliances of an office and workshop look awkward as hell in any (Gothic-Rococo-Victorian Brothel) room I design.

But it happens I like a white kitchen, and our kitchen happens to have incredible lighting.

So it was the perfect place to put things like a printer and my sewing machine, and hopefully eventually a 3D printer and milling machine.

I was enjoying doing my embroidery at the kitchen table, in the bright, even light, enormously.

So I decided there should be a worktable in the center, where we could eat if we ever wanted to eat in the kitchen instead of in the library while watching Silicon Valley.

At New Year’s when we had friends cooking in the kitchen it became clear we needed a good-sized island as well.

I agonized over the aspect ratio and measurements before finally going with a simple design that could be both sewing table and food prep surface. The whole thing cost less than 130 euros in the end, but it’s very solid.

It will have nice cute handles like the machine wall eventually, I just ran out of money.

Then I designed the machine wall in detail.

There had to be a place for the ladder, and for blank canvas storage, and the, um, annoying amounts of recycling German living generates.

I needed big flat shelves to store drawings and shelves and lots of deep drawers for materials. And of course it had to cost as little as possible. Since food comes slightly before making stuff, I focused on the kitchen part first.

Kitchen side, not quite finished but getting close!

I found a great handyperson, James, an Australian fellow who has all the tools in the world, and we worked together to build the rest of the kitchen side wall. It came out pretty well! We haven’t had money for a dryer yet, but in time.

There will be cool newsprint curtains over the open shelves- I hate open shelving, no matter how hot it is on Apartment Therapy.

This month we finally had enough cash to buy the cabinets for the machine wall.

Ikea delivered them and then I spent five gruelling days building them. It was a lot of work but saved us easily 300 euros even at cheap Berlin labor rates.

James and Jason, another Ozzie, hung the cabinets and suddenly there it was, my workshop.

My organization of mixed media materials is very much inspired by my beloved friend/muse/patron Monique Motil, an artist who manages her studio space as beautifully as she creates.

This Thursday was the shakedown cruise. Daria and Ian came over and we ran all the systems- printing, drawing, ironing decals onto fabric, using every tool in every drawer.

Doll hospital and um, laboratory.

I can honestly say my design worked beautifully.

I opened the second leaf on the table and we all had room to sit and work, and any time we needed something- “Let’s cut the stickers with deckle-edge scissors!” or “Let’s see if we can use the decals to make pendants!” – I could just grab whatever tool or material we needed out of the drawers and cabinets.

When the left-hand leaf is closed, it’s a perfect setup for me to work alone- the drawers are in the right place for a lefty 🙂

We had the most incredible, exhilarating night collaborating in my new workspace.

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Suzanne Forbes, a New Yorker thriving in Berlin. Crowdfunded documentary art made possible by the generous support of her Patrons. https://www.patreon.com/SuzanneForbes.

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