Advanced furniture restoration...

...or how to disassemble a wardrobe that seemingly has been built for eternity. *wipes sweat*

Well, yes, another hobby of mine. I started small, with chairs and stuff, until I fell victim to megalomania this year and lay my hands on three wardrobes and three tables, each about 100+ years old. I can have them for free - only problem is that they have to be removed from that flat. Which would be easy if it were just chairs and stuff. But those are fully grown wardrobes. No problem... Demounting the four doors of the larger twin-wardrobes was comparatively simple, although I must admit that balancing a heavy, glassed cabinet door on your foot, steadying it with your one hand and your head (having three dimensions into which this darn thing can fall over really is fun!) while you're unscrewing the screws of the hinges may sound a tad bit difficult to people who are not used to multitasking. The boards at the back of the wardrobes were unusable and thus removed quickly by kicking them in. Great fun, and great workout! Yeah, and that was when work really started. Facing a virtually naked wardrobe that still outsized me in height as well as in breadth (ok, that is easy, I admit), I called for reinforcement in the form of my darling, usually not so fond of this kind of work but nonetheless ready to come to my aid - and save me shedloads of time, by the way, because hard-headed as I am I would surely have ventured on also without his help, which might have taken me a few hours or days longer. After two hours of continuous, sweat-inducing work (including the excessive use of hammer and chisel) the basis of the wardrobe was still only partly disassembled and my darling frustrated. I think the other wardrobes will simply be sawn apart along a few strategic lines. Whoever built those things aeons ago seemingly put half a tonne of nails and a bucket of glue into each of them! Sometimes I really like Ikea. So the following day I did venture out alone, due to said frustration of my assistant - and funny, once you know the tricky details of a wardrobe's anatomy, it comes apart almost by itself! Or maybe it was just the effect of psychological warfare because I placed a saw on the shelf beside it? Mwahahaha!

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Update: All parts still sitting in the basement, waiting for me to win in the lottery, buy a baroque villa and put them up there, as they're not meant to be assembled and disassembled all the time and there's no use in restoring them when there's no place to put them.

Diary "Candy"

I also do some bookbinding, but way too seldom, so this year I decided to make a diary, inspired by some lovely stickers I found in a shop. Themed "candy", I chose a light blue paper for the pages, candyfloss-pink for the endpaper and wedgewood blue for the cover. The candy stickers were to be set into a framed cutout in the front cover, behind 'glass', like in a shop window.

The body of the book was done first, bound and glued, finished off with the endpaper. Then the parts for the cover were cut from strong cardboard, the front cover backed with light cardboard to support the rectangular cutout.





The cutout in the front cover, backed with the lighter cardboard, is then covered with paper in a nice colour to provide a background for the stickers. Front, back and spine piece are then made into a complete cover before the stickers and the framepiece are glued on. As I noticed that some of the stickers were thicker than the depth of the cardboard I used, I had to improvise and, instead of just covering the cutout with transparent foil and putting a frame on top, I had to make a double frame to add depth to the cutout. So, two identical cardboard frames, transparent film sandwiched in between and covered with the same paper as the rest of the cover.



At last, the book body is glued into the finished cover - after the bookmark has been added. In this case, I went for a slender satin ribbon with a little pink-iced cake at the end. The cake is about 1.8 cm by 1.2 cm, made of pink satin ribbon, stuffed with cotton, topped with a little red glass bead and sewn to the end of the bookmark.