UP-CYCLING OR DOWN-CYCLING?

That is the question, whether it is sufficient simply to paint it off white, and pretend that you’ve transformed your grandmother’s old sewing table into a sheik bedside lamp table, or whether one would do better to lavish a little TLC on it and continue to use it for what it was intended. Banjo Beale in his book Wild Isle Style quoted me as cheekily reversing the sense of up to down cycling, but I was serious, deadly serious. I have seen some horrors in my time, and sometimes the sad looking items of furniture are pleading with me to rescue them. We used to term these pieces hospital jobs in the antique trade, since the time taken to bring them back to their former glory far outweighed any monetary recompense. One such piece was a rare late 17^th century oak chest of drawers, which had been painted pink, covering the original English chinoiserie lacquer. It took many hours of patient scraping to restore it to its former glory, and for many years it stood in my studio on a high stand and appeared in many of my early paintings. Today it sits lower on bun feet, gracing the back wall of my parlour.

A couple of weeks ago I found this child chair in Bethesda charity shop in Stornoway. It had the look, but, oh dear, what indignities had been lavished on it in the name of up cycling. The ubiquitous coat of pink paint along with over stuffed seat and back, with a totally inappropriate chequered gingham cotton had transformed it into a sad sack that would now, even with a price tag of £2 be very unlikely to find a buyer. But then it caught site of me and knew that all was not lost. Here was a man who could see its potential and would be prepared to give it a new lease of life.

I can only imagine that it was the person’s first encounter with a staple gun, since they had gone totally berserk with the new toy. There were literally hundreds of staples and it took way longer than I had envisaged to remove them.

 The end result was a cane back child’s chair from around 1900. The caning had long since gone, but I had another idea for that. I reupholstered the seat with a piece of my own tweed, making sure to leave the original show wood, and on the back using the original cane holes I wove in four ply wool. This I consider to be up cycling in the true sense.

 Another example was a couple of bedroom chairs I rescued from a local house. One had been chucked out into the garden because it had a major infestation of wood worm in the back. Unlike the supermarket bargains of buy one and get one free, I was about to get two and make one.

 The front legs of both chairs were in good condition and so I decided to transform them into an upholstered stool. Once again I used my own tweed, adding a cluster of five buttons to ensure the stuffing stayed in place.