Waynification

Short of crashing it into a tree then setting it on fire, there was no way I could really make my new car look like Wayne, but I at least wanted to make it a little easier to pick out in a parking lot.

DASHBOARD COVER

 

When Mum had the audacity to suggest that perhaps I didn’t want the most expensive material in the store for a dashboard cover that was going to sit in the sun and fade, I tore into her like a starving man at a smorgasboard. Two months later, I sat bolt upright at 2 a.m. exclaiming “Why didn’t I buy cheap material for the bottom and use the print for the top?”

When I called Mum to query why she didn’t point this out at the time, she chose to plead the fifth, cheerily disregarding the fact that we don’t actually live in America.

I didn’t want to recover the old one, since I may actually want to sell the car to somebody without the same passion for classic literature, so I laid it on a long roll of butcher’s paper and traced the outline to make a pattern and cut out two pieces of material. Wadding falls apart easily, so I didn’t sew the back and front together and then insert it, like a cushion insert: I laid the two pieces of material right sides together with the wadding on top, and stitched all three together, leaving a small gap to turn it right side out and handstitch it closed.

I bought the thickest wadding I could find. This was a mistake. It’s kind of like having a giant, flat stuffed animal in front of your windscreen. If I was doing it again, I’d use thinner wadding and sandwich it between a couple of pieces of stiffener – I don’t think stiffener alone would be thick enough.

Another discovery was that you get to look at it even more than you expected, because the windscreen reflects the pattern. It’s always there in front of you, like a strange mirage. 

HEAD REST COVERS 

Creating the pattern was interesting, since I had to stab pins into the headrest like nails to hold the paper in place while I traced each section, rolling it as I went to get from the underneath of one side to the other side. I did have the foresight to mark the paper with front, back and top sections, so cutting the material was easy (adding a couple of inches as seam allowance, of course). The actual sewing part was…more interesting.

I’d never sewn on a curve before, at least not without Nan to supervise, gradually get impatient then do it herself. I was laying the pieces of material out flat and trying to get the edges to line up so I could pin them together, and it was not working. Eventually I put the material on the headrest cover, right side down, and pinned along the top of the curve, then took it off before it got stuck and pinned the rest. From there it was just a matter of stitching the raw edges together.

Getting the covers on was like trying to dress a particularly wiggly five year old in a two year old’s clothing. Slipping it on from the top down didn’t work: I had to get one corner in then work the material over the top to the other side. Obviously, I had to leave the underside unsewn, so the material at the bottom was still hanging down. I will never confess to Nan or Aunty Barbara that I hate hand stitching so much that the bottom of the headrest covers are held together with duct tape.

STEERING WHEEL COVER

I followed this tutorial, but let’s face it, a steering wheel is a giant circle: there’s only so many variations of how to make a cover for it. I hadn’t realised just how visible the interior of the cover would be: I think I expected the elastic to be magnetic and seal the edges together. Next time I would probably line it, or at least pick a material with a decent backside. No, I don’t mean material with a Betty Boop print. 

CD VISOR

Clearly, Justin Bieber wasn’t doing a good enough job of driving people insane and so God decided to invent bias tape. Behold and admire the CD holders, since they are the first and the last things I will ever make with the horrible stuff.

The tutorial from Puking Pastilles was very clear and detailed, but it kind of glossed over exactly how thick the project gets: by the time I’d reached ten layers of fabric with interfacing plus elastic, the bias tape I’d bought was too thin to wrap around it and my sewing machine had declared its intention to pack up and move to Hawaii.

GEARSTICK COVER

This project started with ripping the gearstick cover to pieces (which makes it sound like I used bare hands and brute strength, but actually I used a Quick Unpick). Cotton alone would have been too flimsy, but I didn’t see the point in replacing one plain boring leather cover for another plain boring leather cover, so I decided to take it apart, glue the new material to the old material and put it all back together again. I only removed the top section and tore out one seam, but working with the cover flat let me wrap and glue the material around the bottom without the elastic scrunching it, and sew straight lines along the seams I wasn’t unpicking. It would be possible to do it just by gluing, but it might not have held its shape as well.

With blithe disregard for the fact that they didn’t match anything, at all, in any sense, I cut each end off the shoelaces from my Batman Converse, stitched the two sections together and fed it through as the cord.

It took me three tries to get the Velcro sewn back on close-enough-to-properly. If you’re going to take something apart and then try to recreate it, for the love of god take proper photos of it first.

CUP HOLDER

 I really should have taken a photo of the cup holder before I took it off to spray paint it, since I couldn't figure out how to put it back together again.

WINDOW WINDER COVERS

They’re literally just a circle two inches in diameter wider than the window knob, with a piece of elastic sewn in. (Well, I needed something else that matched my pirate duck.)

 Some kind of tacky plastic animal is an old Wayne tradition, though the ducks automatically lose by virtue of not being blueberry-scented.

POCKET ORGANISER

Originally I was going to make the organiser for the car so I had somewhere to dump my wallet and phone, but since the CD visor freed up the console for that, I stuck it on my bedroom wall instead. It probably would have turned out a lot better if I hadn't been in a 'I do not measure things or pin things!' mood. Also, I ran out of stiffener and so I had to cut up Zoe's cereal box. She won't mind. I hope.

Extension Cord Tree

You know something is wrong when you tell your friends “sorry, I can’t, I’m decorating my extension cord tonight” and they say “oh, okay” without looking even mildly disconcerted.

The weird outdoor powerpoint in the roof finally got its chance to shine.

I plugged the end in and propped the power board against a brick so that the cord hung in midair and I could paint the whole thing at once - plus it had the benefit of being outside. (I was going to say that if I breathe in any more paint fumes while painting indoors I’ll go loco, but, um. I’m painting an extension cord.) Once it dried, I put a couple of cord hooks on the wall and snapped it in so it dangled in a vaguely tree-like shape.

I was originally going to print and stick paper leaves on it, but that seemed a little ‘who let a class of six year olds loose in your bedroom?’. Then I remembered the pillow I made Zoe for Elli Day.

I cut out another pile of fabric leaves and doused them with fabric stiffener, then snipped off a bunch of ten centimetre sticks of twenty-gauge wire and Mod Podged them to the leaves. From there, all I had to do was wind the end of the wire around the cord and bend the ‘stem’ until I liked the angle. 

 My favourite is the little owl hanging out on the knothole of the tree, though.

I suppose the advantage of never buying anything new is that hey, everything matches!

Now I only have to come up with seven more projects using leaves to finally get rid of that weird material with exasperated-looking angels on it.

Key Rack

This was the easiest of projects. All I had to do was:

1. Spray paint the edges black.

2. Measure the length and divide it by three, one section for each us. Mark each section at the top and the bottom.

3. Out of my stash of exactly four different scrapbook papers I found one that suited each of us and laid them one by one on top of each section, lined up with the marks. I traced the curve of the edge and cut the paper, occasionally actually cutting along the line.

4. Slap on a bit of Mod Podge and three cup hooks.

I hung it by the front door and we all solemnly donated our spare keys, ready for the next time one of us was out and somebody had to shuffle cars. It was a foolproof plan, FOOLPROOF, until we realised afterwards that Jess can’t drive a manual. Mine and Lyndon’s cars? Manual.

Picture Book Decoupage Desk

As with so many projects, this started with nothing on tv, an empty wallet, a $2 Scout Auction purchase and a promise to Nan to do something about that dreadful desk, dear. The craft room is picture-book themed, with a memorial frame for Stories Bookshop, a quote from Neil Gaiman’s poem Instructions and illustrations hanging on the walls.

So, in the absence of illicit drug use or brain damage, why did it take me an hour to figure out that hey, maybe I should decorate with a picture book? I picked one of my favourites, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good Very Bad Day. Ironically, it almost became a terrible, horrible, no good very bad day, because Zoe's scanner drivers don't work with Windows 7 so I spent three hours trying to come up with an alternate way of making it work, then eventually gave up, photocopied the book pages, pieced them together and hoped for the best.

"He also said to watch out for the books on his desk, and I was careful as could be except for my elbow." I always related to this one - my elbows went off on frolics of their own, too.

‘Best’ is not exactly what I got, but it’s better than a whack on the nose with a rusty poker. Which is what I would have got if Nan had found out I still hadn’t painted a year and a half later.

Batman Furniture

Two days before his birthday, I sent Lyndon this email: ‘Start preparing tearful speeches about how you couldn't possibly deserve a friend as incredible as me, because I just finished your birthday present and it is exceptionally cool.’

In hindsight, I might have oversold it a little.

After two hours in the secondhand bookshop flipping though Batman comics to find the ones with the best VENGEANCE IS MINE catchphrases, I was ready to start. I bought four comics for both pieces of furniture and it was plenty, even after I accidentally stepped on a couple of pages. I did a cursory sand of both the table and chair before I started gluing, but Mod Podge is strong enough to decoupage the surface of the moon, so it’s probably not essential.

With uncharacteristic generosity, I’d volunteered to play taxi for Zoe and Jess, so I had until 2 a.m. to play with the layout. I didn’t want to lay them out overlapping like Bombus does, because then you wouldn’t be able to read the soulful declarations of ‘AND THAT ELEGANT COMBINATION SPELLS YOUR DOOM!’, so I had a lot of piecing together to do. I worked from the centre out, starting with my favourite strips and filling in the gaps later, always trying to make sure I had a variation of colour, to the maximum extent possible in a comic where the hero never changes his clothes.

For the chair, I’d worked a ten-hour day and wanted to go watch Gilmore Girls, so I slapped strips on with even less planning than Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, and it turned out just as well as the table. I’m still not sure whether to be pleased or distressed. 

 This time I wrapped the strips around the edge and underneath so it looked good from the side as well. My experience with corners is that you’re probably going to end up with a wrinkle, so succumb to the inevitable and just keep it small.

I’d thought it might be too lumpy to sit on, but I didn’t overlap the strips excessively, and after a few coats of varnish it was almost smooth. I started both off with Arbee Crystal Clear Handcraft Spray Varnish, then five coats of polyurethane, which is not as excessive as it seems given that beer-and-chocolate encrusting is not so much a possibility as an inevitability. Since Nan might be reading this, I’m obliged to tell you that you should sand lightly between coats of varnish.

I’m pretty happy with them – they’re not bad for someone who was pronouncing decoupage “de-coop-adge” just a couple of weeks earlier.

The Wayne Memorial Letters

Wayne is the only man I will ever truly love. He was my first car, and he was beautiful.

It wasn’t just his three different paint colours and cow-spotted furry roof that made me fall head over heels for him. This was a car whose headlights would suddenly fail at midnight on the highway, whose passenger door would swing open unprompted when you turned a corner, whose handbrake would fail while parked in the driveway so that he rolled down into the street, whose bonnet would fly up while driving, completely obscuring your vision. This was a car who wanted to make your life interesting. Even people I’d never met knew his name. 

I was devastated when he finally went to the great car-yard in the sky, and at our old house I had a memorial wall in his honour: but here, the problem of the Blu-tac prohibition again reared its ugly head. Luckily, I had cardboard letters of his name in the boot of my car, where they’d been sitting soaking up petrol fumes for the past year and a half.

I decorated collage-style with different memories and souvenirs – it had to be messy and haphazard, or it wouldn’t be Wayne. (Really, leaving them to be crushed by oil containers in the boot wasn’t enough battering. I should have set them alight, put out the fire by soaking them in the bathtub then buried them in the backyard for six months.)

When Lyndon and I went to stay with a friend for the holidays, her son presented me with a card upon our arrival that contained his dire predictions regarding whether we were likely to ever make it home again.

His sister was equally cheerful. 

Dear Rach - I did not draw Wayne on the front of this card because I knew he would have spoilt it for you.

His predictions thankfully did not come to pass - this, however, did. 

The rest of the Y was also decorated with various recollections of mechanical failures and a photo of the corresponding part. (I could have decorated an entire alphabet with this.)

 Even the tops got some love. 

Others were taken from emails I'd sent years ago. 

Many of the memories are happy ones, but many of them also make me want to clutch my wallet to my chest protectively.

The now-teenage author of the Lyndon-pushing-Wayne card was recently talking to his mother about whether money could buy happiness, and pointed out that owning a Ferrari would make you fairly cheerful. “Do you think any car could make Rach happier than Wayne did?” she countered.

He was silent.

Chest of Drawers

This furniture makeover was essentially the equivalent of buying a rat-infested sewer and building a million-dollar house in it, complete with outdoor swimming pool.

I picked up the chest of drawers at the Scout Auction for $2 a couple of years ago, and it was expensive at the price. I then spent $45 on way more paint than I actually needed and another $15 on material.

I did four coats of white undercoat, trying to cover up the old green and purple paint – yes, green and purple on the same piece of furniture – when it finally occurred to me that I was about to paint it brown, so it didn’t actually need to be perfectly white before I started the top coats. (Where were you when I needed you, Captain Obvious?)

Because I hate wrapping corners, I was planning to cover only the face of the drawers with material. This was an insanely bad idea, because it meant I was going to have to somehow cut a straight line along all four edges without the material fraying, all to save cutting a few corners. Luckily, I always cut material ridiculously too big so I was able to change plans when I realised I was stupid.

Never cut the corners before you start gluing, because if you’re anything like me, you’ll end up with random squares missing from the front and sides where your cuts didn’t actually come anywhere near aligning with the corners. When you do glue, put the Mod Podge only on the front of the drawer so it doesn’t get on the material you’re about to cut the corners out of., since scissors and glue hate each other with the intensity of Batman and the Joker. I painted the glue and smoothed the material in sections, since it dries quickly. I suggest you don’t attempt to sit and chat to Zoe while gluing, at least not if you want your material on the right way up.

                                                                                                                 

The corners I cut out in half-squares, which mostly worked fine, but if you cut on the wrong angle you get little slivers of drawer showing through. I feel like there’s an industry-approved way of doing this that the internet is conspiring to hide from me.

Mum, I would know how to do this properly if you hadn’t spoilt me by covering all my high school books for me.

To reattach the drawer handles, just feel the fabric until you find the hole and punch the screw through it from the top, then remove: it doesn’t matter if the material frays a little, since it’ll be covered by the handle anyway. (Yes, I also hide my junk under my bed and sweep dust under rugs.) For the love of all things holy, do not put the drawers back in before you try to move it back to its home, unless you’re training for the Olympic weightlifting team.

 The handles, which I had to peel daisy stickers off, are incredibly crappy, but since I’ve already spent far too much on this project, I give the same excuse I always give when something’s clearly dodgy – “it’s post-modernist”.

When Lawrence came over a couple of days later, he squinted at it and said “Oh, did I lend you my paint?” He has four litres of exactly the same colour.

That was a dark day in our household.

Tile Picture

‘This is going to be excellent,’ I thought. ‘Ninety cents for tiles and two dollars for tissue paper? Best Christmas present that’s ever been bought completely out of parking money.’ I didn’t factor in the hundred or so hours it took me to make the gods-cursed thing.

The tutorial from Instructables was simple and straightforward, which means it missed out so much detail I found it almost impossible to follow. The basic process was good, though, so I just filled in the gaps as I went along.

Photos that will look the best are the ones with light backgrounds, because it blends into the tile and looks like the people are painted on, whereas photos with dark backgrounds look like you printed it on tissue paper and stuck it on a tile.

Eventually, after trying hundreds of free programs that would split only half the image, or declared excitedly that I was the winner of a FREE iPod but wouldn’t actually split any of my image, I found TileMage, which was simple and effective. For cutting each square, I went with the low-tech approach: dropping each square into a Publisher document and cropping the edges in by 0.5 cm. I don’t even have a Facebook, okay. Photoshop was way beyond my technical prowess.

I tried all the techniques for printing on tissue paper suggested in the Instructables comments, from ironing it onto regular paper to gluing it on the paper with Mod Podge. The only thing that worked for me was cutting out squares of tissue paper slightly larger than the image and sticking them onto regular paper with masking tape around the edges, which won’t melt in an inkjet printer like it would in a laser. An entire ream of paper and two ink cartridges later, when you finally have nine decent images, cut them out with a ruler and a Stanley knife.

The gluing step will work far better if you’re not poor and you have a laser printer. The only laser printers I know of are at the university, and I suspected that lying on the library floor with my scissors and masking tape would probably get me kicked out of law school, and possibly also deported. The best method for gluing tissue paper is to lay it on the tile and paint the glue lightly on top of it, but if you try this with an inkjet printer, the ink will run like the cops are chasing it.

The trick is to be so gentle the paper just thinks it’s lying down and choosing not to get up again, and doesn’t realise it’s actually been glued. Use a very thin layer of glue and wait until it’s tacky but not quite dry. If you use too much then when it dries you’ll be able to see the streaks through the paper, though you can’t when using normal paper, and the ink may also discolour in spots. Get a bird’s eye view and lower the tissue down slowly, because once it makes contact, the only way it’s coming off is in pieces.

I also tried the ironing method at this stage (which is the most I’ve ever used an iron: since I don’t iron my clothes, it took me almost thirty minutes just to find it – I wasn’t sure if we even owned one). The advantage is that because it uses even pressure, it doesn’t smudge the ink like finger-smoothing may, but it also doesn’t do a particularly good job of getting rid of wrinkles and air bubbles. Pick your poison.

Quite obviously, I wasn’t going to seal them with Mod Podge. I used three coats of Arbee Crystal Clear Handcraft Varnish, which doesn’t produce a particularly tough coating, but since I wasn’t planning to use them as coasters I figured it didn’t matter.

                                                                               

                                                                                            

Of course, the frugality of the present was somewhat undermined when Mum went out and had it professionally framed. Don’t think this is some great reflection on my artistic skill, though: if I sneezed on a piece of paper, she’d put it on display in a glass cabinet patrolled by security guards.

Music Tables

I was getting to that point with my dad and my brother of buying them gag gifts like a “Jar of Nothing” for Christmas, yes, actually paying money for a jar whose sole attribute was having nothing in it, simply because I had no idea what to get them. Enter decoupaged tables (or, in my brother’s case, a plant stand that I thought was a table).

This was my first adventure in decoupage, and in hindsight, it’s amazing that it wasn’t my last. Once I’d printed and cut my pieces of paper, I started by laying them out in various ways and taking photos so I could compare which I liked better.

It all went to hell after that.

Despite my careful planning, the pieces of paper have more gaps than a felon’s alibi, thanks to my complete inability to cut in a straight line. In some places I had to overlap more than I wanted to and lost lyrics.

  

I’d decided to use sheet music around the edges, but the edges were curved and the corners were, astonishingly, round, and the paper was too thick to be manipulated easily – I should have switched to regular paper rather than card. 

And if I’d thought the corners were bad, just wait until I got to the legs at the bottom.

If there’s some kind of round hole punch that would have helped in this situation, I want one, because I had to cut a haphazard circle, squish it around the leg, figure out roughly how much more needed to come off and hack haphazardly at it again.

I evidently had faith in my inkjet printer that bordered on the religious, because I decided to paint the heavy-duty varnish on without sealing the ink with papercraft spray varnish first. See that, erm, artistically smeared section at the top? Yeah. That’s what happens.

 But it’s the thought that counts, right?

The finished product is less than perfect, but given that it’s a table and its sole purpose is to be covered by stuff, I guess that’s okay.

Caleb had the benefit of being second, so his wasn’t quite so bad. Which you might actually have been able to tell if I hadn’t been getting slap-happy with the flash that day.

I’d learnt my lesson from Dad’s, and overlapped until gaps were physically impossible. I had fun with the middle section, since it was all songs we'd both liked and some songs we'd danced around in our underwear to. I’m not sure if this was meant to be artistically slanted or if I was still high on varnish fumes and sleep deprivation.

I do have to confess, though, I quite like the base.

So. Better than a Jar of Nothing? The jury’s still out.