Mrs Birks Blogs

Everyone knows that I do like a bit of upcycling.  In fact recently, we upcycled our very old and very grotty Ikea table.  I mention that it's an Ikea one so that you all know that I didn't destroy a fantastic, retro piece of furniture with glue and paint.  It was already a grotty looking thing that had started yellowing pretty badly, so we had nothing to lose by upcycling in a slightly experimental way. When we cleared out my in-laws house we kept some of their old maps - I had a vague notion of doing something crafty with them.  What we hadn't noticed when Barbara and Nick were alive was that everytime we had moved house (and we have moved house a lot) they had bought an Ordnance Survey map of that area.  The husband and I were both really touched by this, so the maps felt even more special and we thought we might want some of them 'out' to look at.  Queue perfect marriage of table that needs a tidy up and maps of special places we have been. I p...

Last year I bought 4 new (old) chairs so that I would have enough to host my daughter's birthday party.  Our old chairs were looking a bit shabby and two of them had developed a wobble so after the party, the plan was to get rid of the old chairs and upcycle the new (old) ones.  Skip to one year later and we have finally upcycled our chairs and they look pretty special (although don't look too closely) Before the upcycle they looked like this: These are the chairs after some sanding down, shortly after we collected them.  We bought them through eBay for £20 - a bargain at £5 per chair and collected from about 10 minutes away from our house.  They then sat in our shed for a number of months... Here they are after the upcycle: We used some chalk paints from B&Q - some little tester pots to get different colours and a top coat by Frenchic (which looked suspiciously like watered down PVA).  The top coat gave the finished chairs a nice 'feel' a...