About Me

My photo
Vermont
Check my shop on Etsy. http://www.etsy.com/shop/UpcycleRecycleReuse

Search This Blog

Showing posts with label designs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label designs. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Netherlands - Upcycled Wood



http://www.designbuzz.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/newspaper-wood_tqpRV_41416.jpg

Dutch Designer makes wood out of Newspaper

The ordinary:
Wood has always been used to make paper, but, with new techniques and ingenuity, paper now becomes wood and utilized in different form in many products. The news paper is used as a raw material. Hard texture is given to these newspapers by recycling them and the recycled newspaper is used for making various products. Newspaper Wood is the unique way of using waste material and creating much exciting and useful products out of it. This process of up cycling is the new way to bring life to old dumped recyclable waste.

Inspiration:
A Dutch designer Mieke Meijer worked on this project in her workshop at Eindhoven, Netherlands. Her work is appreciated by a design firm Vij5 and they used this Newspaper wood in creating furniture pieces. Vij5 helped Mieke Meijer in implementing the vital processes into production and marketing. Her work was unnoticed for a period of four years. It was in Milan Design Week 2011, however, the furniture items of this wood were showcased. This process is time consuming, but the end result produce wood like material which has wood grains or rings of trees in a series of layers. It is the creativity of the designer that has transformed dumped newspaper piles into beautiful creations by a simple process of upcycling. Thus, saving the life of so many trees that can be cut down to make wooden items.
The extraordinary:
The newspaper wood created is eco friendly as it utilized the waste newspaper and is of great value. Special machines are used for compressing newspaper by rolling it very tightly to produce log of the size of tabloid. These tabloid logs are quiet similar to real wood in appearance.
The making:
Mieke Meijer, a graduate from the Design Academy Eindhoven made this concept of newspaper wood popular. Certainly, it’s her ideas and hard work that made it possible to create wood from recycled newspaper. The designer glued the stack of newspaper one by one and rolled it very tightly. The wood obtained is slightly deformed and can be sandpapered. So, the end product is the wood which can be cut or sanded and can be transformed into any product just like wood.

Source: http://www.designbuzz.com/dutch-designer-upcycles-discarded-newspaper-into-wood/

Sunday, April 8, 2012

Upcycled Clothing - Poland



IMAGE OUTLOOK: Dominika Naziębły crafts a collection the upcycled way
A fashion designer by profession, Dominika Naziębły loves to craft clothes using upcycling. She used clothes that had been discarded and swaps them into fashionable forms by beautifully changing their character and quality. This graduate in fashion designing makes good use of whatever she learnt during her college days and crafts designs which are eye-appealing. IMAGE OUTLOOK has sustainable designs and consuming plus has been crafted in a tasteful manner.


upcycled dresses by dominika design













Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Repurposing Reclaimed Vintage Treasure

Repurposing Reclaimed Vintage Treasures has become a passion of ours. With our shop Divine Designs here on Etsy and our local business Southern Restoration we gather and upcycle some of the most unique items that anyone can find. We use old single pane windows, barn roof tin, poultry items, old farm parts, and just about anything that can be found in the grass on an old country road to make some of the best housewares pieces out there. Please take a look at what we can do and give us a chance to upcycle a treasure for you or your event.

Divine Designs
Featured items from DivineDesignsInc 


"Giving Purpose to Reclaimed Materials
  • Hello, My name is Tom Richards and with the support and ideas of my wife Anna we love to use old items and make them into something new. She is a Speech Pathologist and I manage a retail store in the Atlanta Ga area.
    Divine Designs aka Southern Restoration started as a hobby and quickly turned into gifts for family and friends, followed by Etsy and Craft Shows. We have a very busy life with a 3 year old and a 3 month old but we always have time to make new and fascinating things from reclaimed materials.
    For those who craft and those who love crafts, our story starts with a simple picture after our first born son. Trying to find just the right photo frame that would portray our family like we felt, on the wall seemed to be a challenge.

    The Start:
    Taking on the daunting task of looking for a frame for our first family photo to hold an 11x14 photo with a large matte ended and our Etsy shop began. The quotes were scary and this is how it all began. Finding a large frame with out the $200 to $250 price tag and without waiting on the famous “Michaels” 1/2 off framing sale, we deciding on the mission of finding something cheaper.
    This is how we got into windows. Wooden windows particular very older reclaimed windows work great for photos and can be painted, stained or just scraped to add anything from distressed to a very modern look with some effort. Windows led to barn wood, barn wood led to metal and magnet boards and our second son led to “we need more burp cloths”.

    The Designer
    My wife Anna is a Speech Pathologist by day and a great idealist by night. She comes up with the fantastic quirky ideas with ribbon, colors, and paper that we add to every piece of wood or metal that we run through the shop.

    The Laborer
    The Husband or Tom, scours the area for old windows, barn wood and structure ideas to turn into end products. I do have a job but seem to put more into our shop to make sure that it is a success. Detail oriented and never satisfied make a good product in our opinion.

    Our Products
    Our products are full of character and we just love using things from the past. Anything reclaimed can just make the room or wedding. Nectar and Company owned by some friends from school have given us lots of ideas about materials, from chicken feeders to bread bowls, you name it and it has 100 uses in our lives"


    Please follow us on 
    Facebook @ www.facebook.com/Southernrestorationllc
    Tumblr @ southernrestorationllc.tumblr.com
    to keep up with new products and give aways!!