I don’t care what the electronic revolutionaries say, getting a coffee-table-sized review copy of a beautifully printed art, design, or craft book in the mail is still a lot closer to Christmas than downloading a pdf. I carried home Wary Meyers’ Tossed and Found: Unconventional Design from Cast-offs (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, September 2009) like a kid with a new toy. It’s packed with creative re-use projects, and not the silly ones you did with old tin cans and spray-painted macaroni in third-grade art class, either. Linda and John Meyers are the designing minds of Wary Meyers Decorative Arts, in Maine, and they do things I never would have thought of—like personalizing a house key by cutting the shape of a monogram out of the top.
That’s one of the trickier projects—you need a jeweler’s saw and a good drill—but painting an old radiator in a gradient of color takes nothing but paint and a careful eye. I thought it might look a little ’70s rainbow-child, but done with the right colors and enough subtlety, it’s absolutely beautiful, as though the radiator’s coming alight.
They clearly have a sense of humor—they frost old highball glasses with smudges that suggest sexy lipstick and make pillows out of Astroturf. (I’m not wild about Astroturf even on the ground, but they said they wanted to feel like they were lounging on the grass when they hung out on the side porch, and I’m willing to grant them the make-believe.)
Anyway, I got so inspired, I started steering the dog to the local thrift shop on our morning walks. Surely one of the cast-offs sitting bedraggled in the rain would spark similar genius?
I stared at the gold metal headboard. Nothing. The inevitable, lumpy old sofa. Nothing. The oddments of plastic and veneered furniture—surely there was something creative I could do with all those entertainment centers and cubbyholed desks? Nothing.
I went back to the book and realized the secret. Sure, they said they went to flea markets and yard sales—but what they brought back to paint their blue-willow chair was an old Eames chair. And the engraved stool was an Alvar Aalto stool!
Hmmph. Maybe they have that stuff at Maine flea markets, but it’s not lined up at the old train depot in Waterloo.
I felt better about myself. I could be creative too, if I had the right materials. Anybody can be an artist, when they have the best tools and supplies.
Then I turned the page and saw their utterly cool wingback chair, made from an old vinyl chair, a bit of plywood, and a steel auditorium chair. It could be further designed, they noted, to carve the back into a Chippendale homage.
So much for rationalization. I went back to the depot to try again.
--Jeannette Cooperman, staff writer
