Saturday, January 3. 2009
Starting the new year off right... or at least trying
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My SO is an artist, so he‘s very creative. He‘s also very skilled at working with all kinds of materials – wood, metal, etc.. He‘s built shelves and cupboards for me, made me a raddle for my loom, helped me renovate – you get the idea. And he hates to throw anything away which could potentially serve as art or building materials (I won‘t go into details on the resulting storage and retrieval problems). This is background information for the following story.
Years ago, I “rescued” a treadle sewing machine (Phoenix brand) that the neighbors were going to throw away. I have no idea where they got it, but it had obviously not been used for sewing for a long time. The table was lovely wood with inlaid decorations and an inlay measuring “tape”, but the wood was scratched, someone had parked a can of paint on it which had left a ring, etc.. And the sewing machine didn‘t work. A mechanically-minded friend spent a whole day trying to coax it into action, but it just wouldn‘t work. For a while I used it to wind bobbins, then it got relegated to a decorative function – as a table in my entry.
I took out the machine itself, filled the resulting hole with a piece of (not matching) wood, and covered the surface with a runner. It has a nice little drawer which was a good place to keep my keys close by the front door. I was ok....but it wasn‘t really beautiful.
Last year, my SO removed the original wooden table and replaced it with a nicer wooden surface to make what is a much more attractive, interesting side table for my living room.
And he kept the original wooden table top (remember, he hates to throw things away).
As a quilter, I have several cutting mats (the “self-healing” type that are used together with rotary cutters). I know that they should be kept lying level (not leaning against the wall) and out of direct sunlight (they warp), but one day I put a warm tea-kettle on the largest mat (don‘t ask – I can‘t remember why I was so negligent) which made it warp in a kettle-sized circular area and, of course, made it a very poor surface for accurately cutting fabric on. If justice is its own reward, then stupidity (or scatterbrainedness) is certainly its own punishment! Oh well, I had been using it for a long time, the surface was pretty well scarred, maybe it was time for a new one anyway. Did my SO want the warped one? Of course. He wasn‘t sure what he would do with it, but something was sure to come up.
And something did. I‘m not sure when and how things clicked, but the old sewing machine table and the warped cutting mat were combined to make a really lovely card table.
First he sawed out the whole center section of the table (with the hole for the sewing machine)...
He filled the resulting hole with some scrap wood....
leaving an indented area large enough to hold a piece of the cutting mat which he cut to fit.
He turned the cutting mat piece upside down (no cuts and no grid lines) and – voila! a card table – the only one of its kind in the whole world – and the very satisfying feeling of not having wasted good materials.
And look how lovely the inlay work looks now!
