From trash to treasure: Kate Humble looks at upcycling unwanted items.
Kate Humble (right) turns her hand to repurposing and upcycling unwanted old items in The Weekend Workshop. Melenie Parkes reports.
Do not let the prospect of failure put you off that DIY project – just give it a go.
That’s the message from Kate Humble, presenter of the Living Channel’s The Weekend Workshop.
In this series, Humble and her co-presenters Max McMurdo and Zoe Pocock upcycle unloved items into brand-new practical pieces. But Humble certainly lives up to her name as she talks about her own skill level.
“Max and Zoe are obviously masters at upcycling. They are proper craftspeople – I am not. And there were some things that I thought, ‘Oh, I’m sure I can make that’ and it turned out that I really couldn’t or not that well.”
Produced during lockdown, Humble’s husband Ludo Graham worked as the director and cameraman on her segments for the show, filmed on their farm in the Wye Valley in South Wales.
“I was using all his tools and there was quite a lot of swearing off camera where he’d say, ‘You are so going to break my drill’. So I hope I’m the person who can represent the kind of, ‘We’ll-give-it-a-good-go attitude’.
“It may not work first time, or even second time, but you then feel supremely proud of yourself if you do something and it doesn’t fall to bits in the first five minutes.
“Basically, what I’m saying is that if I can give it a go, really, everybody can. This is not beyond anybody,” she laughs.
Humble, who has enjoyed a long career in television, presenting shows including Curious Creatures, Animal Park and her own series Escape To The Farm With Kate Humble and Kate Humble’s Coastal Britain, says she thinks the ideas in the series struck a chord with viewers, particularly at a time when people found themselves struggling for ways to stay occupied.
“We live in quite a wasteful society. We throw a lot of stuff away. We don’t give ourselves time to actually be creative and have the joy of making stuff that we can then use – useful stuff.
“So I think the concept of upcycling, taking old things, and making great, innovative and just fun stuff, really chimed with people during a time when people had a bit more time.”
The upcycling movement has grown in popularity in recent years as more and more people embrace the concept of reduce, reuse and recycle. But unfortunately, as Humble notes, often the cheapest and easiest way to replace something broken or damaged is to “get on a computer, click on an app and order a new one”.
“But our planet cannot sustain that sort of behaviour, for one, and then, secondly, it’s actually just much more satisfying and much more fun reusing something, fixing it up. And there’s so much information out there, whether it’s TV shows like ours or clever people on the internet,” she says.
Among the projects that Humble tackles in The Weekend Workshop is an old bathtub converted into a herb garden and an outdoor table made from scaffolding boards and fitted with a built-in ice-bucket. But some of her most interesting experiments utilise natural resources rather than recycled items.
After digging out a pond, Humble had an abundance of clay-heavy soil which she used to create two new additions in her garden – a pizza oven and a moulded outdoor sofa covered in grass.
Humble says she chose the ‘turf sofa’ project out of “a kind of bloody-mindedness, really”, after being told it wasn’t possible. “And it’s magnificent. We sit on it to this very day looking out over our view. And every time I sit on it I feel really proud of myself because everyone said, ‘There’s no way you can do this. It’s not going to work.’ And I’m sitting there very smugly with my cider going, ‘It does work’.” Humble and Graham share their farm with a menagerie that includes goats, sheep, dogs, donkeys, geese and even two little rotund sun-lovers of New Zealand descent. “I have two very, very beautiful Kunekune pigs called Duffy and Delilah, so they have Welsh names. And, well, I’m afraid they’re adopted Welsh because obviously their heritage is New Zealand. “They have a little patch that they go and lie in ... and they literally kind of peg themselves out like old women in Florida. “They lie there in full sun and snore like you can’t believe. “They are hilarious. They make me laugh everyday. They’re a very fine piece of New Zealand to have in my Welsh garden.”
“There were some things that I thought, ‘Oh, I’m sure I can make that’ and it turned out that I really couldn’t or not that well.”
– Kate Humble