December e-news

An early treat for you all - the December Newsletter for your reading pleasure, before the silly season kicks in and you've no time to think!

We hope you'll try and make this Christmas a reuse affair on all fronts - Those of you in the market for furniture sized christmas presents should be sure to come along to Finders Keepers at Carriageworks this Friday night 6-10 or Saturday 10-5 and pick up a genuine Curb Collective refurbished wonder.

A quick reminder also that we will be closed 24th Dec - 2nd Jan inclusive so hold on to your donations till we get back please!

Business Time!

Last week we stood back and took a furniture count - We've started no less than TWENTY FIVE pieces in 9 weeks. Now we're at the business end of the semester, we've split into smaller working parties, working in twos and threes to determine the final look of each chair.

Miki finished her pair danes with a bedspread akin to woven sunshine from Pollyanna's own collection. I like to think of these as a pair of kitsch-en chairs. They remind me of kitten heels and martinis and Summer - all good things!*

*Good things outside of a workshop environment. Inside, we like steel caps and fruit cup cordial with our Summer.

Mark has been working patiently on his own black velvet glamour piece. We're waiting for diamante studs to arrive from China to finish off his elegant concept - fingers crossed they come for next week!

Min and Leslie found themselves responsible for a plantation chair that has done the rounds, so to speak. The girls began the piece late last Semester, then Fiona and Anthony have pitched, Stuart and Mick helped spring it, Claire and Glen padded it, and someone else again did the linseed oil!

Min took some time to sew up a lovely neutral patchwork for the final upholstery during the week.

Peter put a few coats on his ply stool and sanded down the chrome legs - You'd never know it used to be a timber laminate chair!

Cathy was hard at work helping all of us redowel, drill, clamp and sand as necessary, and even took the time to show us a little bit of home maintenance - the art of masonry drilling and plugging is a very useful one to know!

All of us are super excited as we were accepted in to The Finders Keepers Market.
Not only is it one of the most selective markets in Sydney, it draws a HUGE crowd, allowing us to promote our Reuse & Repair ethos to plenty of customers, just in time to inform their christmas shopping.

More info on that coming soon!

- Maaike

A little bit fancy

Yesterday we took some fancy photos of the group's work so far as part of the Redfern TAFE/Bower Project

The work so far has been so great we wanted to get something nice for the group, so we went to visit our friends at Bev's Remnant House who gave us great prices on some beautiful remnants we can piece together - fitting in nicely with our belief in lifecycle extension wherever possible! You can see some of those pieces below. Will they end up on the plantation chair? We'll have to wait and see what each working group decides!

We're gearing up towards a final exhibition/end of year extravaganza in late November/early December - Stay tuned!

Week 2 in Redfern 107

We have rarely encountered a more enthusiastic bunch of people, the new space was alive with chairs being pulled apart, benches being sanded and planks stained.

Our Reuse Repair Recycle Furniture classes continued this Wednesday with the second week of teaching timber and upholstery skills in our Redfern Workshop space.

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The Group split into two with half focusing on timber, finishing wooden benches and staining timbers ready for next week and the rest of us getting stuck into our upholstery again.

Some people grabbed the larger chairs we started last week and some of us started stripping 3 new metal frame chairs that came into The Bower the day before.

Everyone worked at lightning speed now starting to feel confident with even the most dilapidated of chairs, and before long the gorgeous timber and cane arm chair from last week got it's final sand and we started re-weaving the base with hessian strips and adding coconut fibre to match the back of the chair we had completed the week before.

Maaike focused on the retro armchair and showed us all the special tricks to replace the unusual missing spring with a new one and then tie off the springs before adding a layer of hessian sack ready for padding and the final layers of fabric.

We all decided the old fabric on the metal frame chairs we found the day before was too tatted and damaged to save and set about pulling out all the staples, which takes a little bit of time but with five people pitching in and taking on three chair it was finished in no time at all, and once we had stripped the fabric off the back and seat they were in surprisingly good condition and all that was left was to deciding what look we wanted and what salvaged material we would cover them in next week.

The single old dining chair which started the day with just its springs re sprung, also got a lot of love with every one of us lending a hand to sand the frame and before you could blink - re-web, stuff and cover the back and seat, then add mountains of recycled flock to the seat ready to be squashed down into a plump cushion.

We really can not thank all the participants enough for such an enjoyable day, everyone helping each other and working as one giant team to accomplish vast amounts of work and breath new life into the forgotten chairs, everyone having fun with a smile on their face making reused creations out of 'junk' to last for generations to come.

- Richard