Curb Collective Update

As our regular followers will know, last year nearly 20 students graduated from Reuse Repair Recycle Furniture - A partnership with TAFENSW Outreach and The Bower designed to teach skills to the local community.This year many of those students are continuing their study, workshopping ideas and business models to build a social enterprise that suits them. They also meet weekly to continue to hone their repair skills, working on a number of chairs and small foot stools in need of reuse and repair love.

Last week the group completed their first commission. Karen's chair was a street find - she saw the potential but didn't find the time to restore it herself (Sound familiar?!). Curb Collective also saw the potential for a contemporary new look for the piece and set to work stripping the yellow paint and upholstering the seat.
Although they bought fabric to complete the job, the group was keen to stick to The Bower's waste not ethos, and selected a panel of discontinued designer fabric from a remnant warehouse.

We couldn't be more excited to see what the group will come up with next, or how they will evolve, so stay tuned!

If you have a question, a query or a commission for Curb Collective send email to curbcollective@bower.org.au.

- Maaike

sanding 101

TAFE Week 7 : A lot of woodwork!

This week was Phil's last time with us, so we decided to learn as much as we could from him before his leaving.

We got done to the job of salvaging a set of six chairs whose upholstery had been done last term. Some of them were broken: would we buy new parts to fix the ones being unusable, or would we take the good parts from other chairs and mix them up to have a smaller set? After a lot of talks, we decided that we preferred to stick to the “reuse and repair” ethos and to have 4 or 5 beautiful chairs, rather than buying new parts to have a correct set of 6.

Once this important decision was made, it was time to set to work! We dismantled the chairs, took the good parts from the bad ones to replace the bad parts of the good ones. It happened to be tricky for some bits as they were glued together, so Phil showed us how to do so with pieces of wood and a mallet.

And then you have... A lot of wood parts!

After that, now that we had the parts we wanted to use, we had to sand all the chairs/parts of chairs... which wasn't to everyone's liking: look at Miki's horrified face!

We formed pairs and triplets to quickly sand the set, and we happily realised that sanding those chairs was far easier than sanding the other ones we had done some weeks ago. 

Thanks a lot for all you taught us, Phil! Everything we learnt from you was very interesting and instructive!

- Fiona & Claire

Paint, oil and other fun things

Wednesday came around again and the enthusiastic team of Furniture Reuse and Restore students assembled at the Redfern workshop to continue our projects and learning. Once again it was a 2 team approach, but with lots of swapping over of personnel between the woodworking and upholstering teams so that most got some hands on experience with both.  
 

A lovely old Oak Armchair is coming along very nicely with the re-springing completed, and the timber arms sanded back ready for varnishing.

At the upholstery bench a team was eagerly continuing work on a set of Romanian chairs that are being converted to more modern looking stools. Extra attention was required to day due to the tricky re-assembly of 8 chairs into 6, and some parts requiring a little hand work to get things together.

At the timber work bench a set of children's size bench seat and table was being continued with a lot of drilling and screwing work required to get them all together. In previous weeks the timbers had been bevelled, sanded, and oiled in preparation for this assembly, and today was the day.

All the team took a hand in the work and gained first hand experience in the use of power drills to drill, countersink, and install woodscrews. Thing wet very smoothly and before long the benches started to take shape

Mention must be made of the spectacular ‘bring a plate’ lunch. Once again people broght along an amazing assortment for our buffet style lunch, and it was an culinary success. Special thanks must go to Maaike for preparing not just one, but several delicious dishes. There was no shortage of dessert either with cakes, strawberries etc galore.

Somehow we managed to push on after all this into the afternoon with our projects getting further keen attention, and many getting very close to completed. Some of the converted stools were even able to get the first coat of brilliant red paint

And the Oak armchair was oiled with linseed oil. You’d never believe it had once been discarded. 
 

We all look forward to continuing next week…..

-Glen