Recycle while Upcycling you will make this world a better place 

Upcycling Furniture was a short serie of upcycling furniture class I ran for The House for an Art Lover in the Spring 2016. I will be running this class again (10 weeks of 2.5 hours on a thursday night) from the 22nd September. For details read New Evening class ! Up-cycle furniture and for bookings here

Last Thursday was the third of a serie of 5 workshops in Up-cycling furniture at Artpark the beautiful complex linked with The House for an Art Lover.

My 8 students had brought their own piece of furniture, and the place was buzzing with chat, brush noise, hair dryer, smelling of glue and paint… Different projects, colour schemes so exciting! Discovering all the creativity you have in yourself is a very powerful tool to your well being. Give me a piece of sand paper any day I am feeling down and I feel my blood flowing better than with chocolate or even red wine 🙂

Every week I introduce my students in a new decorating technique and I am passionate in getting them to push the boundaries of creativity do everything with nothing ! Chalk paint is just a marketing ploy to make you pay £20 for a pot of paint only worth £10. You have to understand how to antic the proper way!
So a while ago we printed with a bit of embossed paper ! Just a snippet ! A sample I had once collected at a local B&Q … A free sample ! A piece of recycling and the result was AMAZING ! A delicate frieze of Art Nouveau style appeared on my board and I heard the gasp when lifting up my improvised stamp. With a bit of recycling I hope I have opened the mind of my 8 ladies to the potential of recycling for Upcycling but for sure they were on a complete high when they left !

 This week to my surprise several of my ladies had raided their own DIY stores for lovely free samples of wall papers !!! And my pile of them is now gigantic … Beautiful delicate flowers !!! Moroccan styles mosaics !!!  Fun camping vans all in great colours !!! And through the two hours of our class our prepared pieces of furniture were decorated with paper cuts in bright colours. A white discarded chair got a triangle treatment while a bright turquoise side cabinet is getting garlands of Chinese looking flowers all this creativity for next to no pennies 🙂 … but so much fun.

  
I am so proud of my students … They are the proof that in this era of consumerism and high tech you can still get great pleasure with bits of colourful paper and a pot of glue.

I can’t wait to see what next week is going to bring us. We are guilding …

This course has been an eye opener for me and I am planning to run it again this Autumn. It will be 10 sessions starting on the 22nd of September. Will you join me ? At the house for an art lover it’s a great venue.

Betty xx