Josiah

by Josiah on January 18, 2013 • 1 Comment Decor Your Home

Combining vintage and modern in your home

Written by contributor Josiah Lowe of The Burlap Bag

Vintage is the new modern – so what does that mean for modern styles? It means they are on the same level. Combining old things with news things can create a very interesting look by contrasting different eras of technology and different eras of materials. Here are some ideas to inspire you to embrace the marriage between old and new in terms of furniture/aesthetic.

Combine your furniture

First – check out this old singer sewing machine that is in our living room. A beautiful wooden desk supported by a dark cast iron base. Compare it to the shiny plastic sony TV on top. At first look it seems a little odd but then you realize they compliment each other quite well. Both pieces are very rectangular without any sharp edges. Both are elegant and sleek. The base of the TV fits perfectly on top of the sewing machine desk almost as if it was meant for something to rest on top….

Combine your gadget holders

Another example a successful joining of old and new is this amazingly well built ipad stand via etsy. A rich woodgrain base accompanied by a wonderful Edison bulb perched atop an old school swinging arm lamp. The craftsmanship of the vintage inspired stand complements the ever sleek and elegant ipad as well as creating interest in the piece as a whole by contrasting old and new styles.

We found this great toolbox on BH&G. It’s a weathered old toolbox converted into a multimedia charging station. The new generation of tools. It’d be easy to make yourself!

Combine your wall art

Another Lowe home example: A chrome rabbit bottle opener tossed in with a collection of vintage paintings. We love the clash of the chrome and classic wood paintings. Fun note: All the owl paintings are made by the same artist “Jean” but were found from three different sources. A random thrift store on our honeymoon and then from two different vintage etsy sellers.

What have you done in your home that combines old and new styles?

by Josiah on September 13, 2012 • 5 Comments Tutorials Your Home

DIY: Add legs to furniture pieces

Written by contributor Josiah Lowe of The Burlap Bag

What do you call a cow without legs….?
Ground beef!! Haha, never gets old…..

What do you call a piece of furniture without legs?
Booooring

So! What shall we do about boring pieces of legless furniture? Add legs! Its so super simple and will look so super awesome. Let me show you.

You will need:

A furniture piece
A drill
4 legs from your local hardware store
Spray paint (optional)

First, pick what furniture piece is definitely needing a leg extension. Here’s ours:

Second: Go buy some furniture leg pieces from a hardware store. We bought skinny ones but they have chunky guys, taller ones, etc. Most of the legs at the store will have a built in threaded bolt at the end of it. You might also notice that there is a piece of hardware called a mounting plate or clinch nut plate. You can use this hardware if you’d like but it does involve more drilling and it might force you to place your legs further away from the edge than you’d like. We ditched the mounting plates. Too complicated. Let’s keep this SIMPLE! The thread will most likely be around 1/4th of an inch so that will be the drill bit we use.

We spray painted the legs a baby blue color - but you could always leave that natural wood color or decide on a paint color later.

Third: Find where you want the legs to go on your furniture piece. Drill four holes.

Fourth: You are ready to install the legs. Screw them in.

There you have it! A fantastic and simple way to make your furniture look so much better.

Do you have some furniture pieces that you could easily spruce up?

by Josiah on September 12, 2012 • 3 Comments Tutorials Your Home

DIY fork handle

Written by contributor Josiah Lowe of The Burlap Bag

Are you tired of people trying to figure out where the utensil drawer is in your kitchen? “It’s the drawer on the left. No, the other one. No, the one closest to the sink.” Instead you could just say “It’s the drawer with the fork drawer pull”.

Also, this is a fantastic way to replace any ugly knobs you might have in an apartment. Instead of going to a hardware store and buying cabinet handles for a couple of dollars each you can go to a thrift store and buy a few forks for thirty cents a pop – plus it adds tons of character to whatever you are adding them to. (Ever since we found out how cheap forks were at the thrift store we’ve been going crazy figuring out what we can do with them. My wife Lauren created this fork bracelet tutorial.)

This is one of those projects that allows for so many creative iterations. But for the sake of the tutorial I am going to show you how to accomplish the functionality of the project. It is your job to get creative with it.

Supplies

Fork

Drill or hammer

Screw or nail

First you are going to want to bend the fork. Bend it enough so that the tines lay flat against a flat surface.

The next step may vary for you depending on what you are using your handle for. If you are just using the fork for a cabinet door a nail will work just fine but if you are going to use the fork on a drawer you might need to drill through the metal of the fork and use your drill to screw the fork on (that way its more sturdy for heavy drawers). We just did ours on a cabinet door so all I needed to do was get a nail, stick it between the two metal tines at the bottom and nail it in. Done! You can see the nail in between the tines in the photo below.

There it is! Get creative with it. Paint your fork, bend the tines into cool designs or maybe even use a spoon!

Have you ever made fun or funky cabinet/drawer handles?

by Josiah on August 9, 2012 • 5 Comments DIY Your Home

Easy breakfast kitchen art

Written by contributor Josiah Lowe of The Burlap Bag

We’re all done with our Thursday “Elements of Design” series – now Lauren and I are going to provide you with some cheap & easy design projects every Thursday.

Today I am going to show you how to make some super hip and modern art for your kitchen. The subject we are going for is the classic bacon and egg. So to start this little project I broke down the basic shapes of each food. The egg is circular (well, for the most part!). And the bacon is mostly linear.

The Yolk

There’s several ways to paint the yolk. You could just wing it and paint a yellow circle.
But I don’t like my circle skills and wanted it to be pretty perfect so I made a stencil. I traced the bottom of a candle on a cereal box and then cut out the circle. Then I painted with acrylic paint inside of the circle to get my perfect yolk.

The Bacon

(mmm, aren’t you hungry just thinking about it?)

Here is where we get a little more modern in our design. Bacon is generally long and rectangular. The strips of delicious fat and meat mimic the bacon’s general rectangular form so we will simplify those strips to also be rectangles. We are going to simplify the color palette to just red and white – no light pinks or color mixing here.

Once again, there’s several ways to paint the bacon. You could just wing it and paint some different sized lines.

But I wanted these to be pretty linear so I made another “stencil”. I used two pieces of paper to cover the canvas so that there was only about 1 inch showing. I tried to make the two pieces of paper as parallel as possible for our first strip of meat on the bacon. I used a small amount of paint to the blank canvas to create a more organic/natural look to the bacon. I then made the stencil smaller and painted another line. Letting it dry in between each “meat strip”, I did the whole process one last time with a thin line in the middle. You can totally play with the line width. And now you have a piece of bacon!

We put our paintings in some frames. Framing is a fantastic way to make awesome art even better. It gives the work a sense of finality or completeness. Our paintings are 5×5 in simple black 5×5 frames. (We actually used old frames we had lying around… and painted directly on the back of those papers that come inside the frames! Ha! So this project cost us… $0)
[Read more...]

by Josiah on July 26, 2012 • 3 Comments Your Home

A lesson in size

Written by contributors Lauren & Josiah Lowe of The Burlap Bag

We are back for our fourth week of our mini series of “Strategies for Designing Your Life”. Each week, we’ll discuss some basic design elements and give examples of how to utilize them. The series will help to add interest, harmony, and unity to your life. So far, we’ve had A Lesson in Color, A Lesson in Shape, and A Lesson in Texture. And check back next Thursday for our final lesson!