RECYCLING ROYALTY
MEET FOXTON’S UPCYCLING QUEEN. NOT ONLY DOES SHE CREATE STYLISH EFFECTS WITH MASKING TAPE AND BRIGHT PAINT, SHE ALSO REDISTRIBUTES ANY PROFITS SHE EARNS FROM HER CLEVER CRAFTING
Foxton’s clever crafting queen Mel Cowan has a special skill — she can make unwanted possessions wonderful again
BEING IN MEL COWAN’S home is a little like being Alice in Wonderland — nothing is quite as it seems. There’s a tea trolley, but it’s sliced in half and hung on the wall. The occasional table used to accompany people on vacation. A retro pulpit has pride of place in the lounge. A piano has been stripped of its music and given a new vocation as a desk.
“I’m always looking at something and seeing in my mind how else it could look, what else it could be,” Mel says, sitting at the kitchen table where most of her projects take place. She’s scratching with her finger at white paint on the wood, a remnant of her last furniture transformation — the de-keyed piano, as it happens.
“It’s like a sickness. That’s why I’m continually changing things around here — even if it’s just re-arranging stuff. I’ll sit in the lounge at night, look at a vase and think, ‘You don’t look amazing anymore.’ I stay awake at night thinking about where I can put that vase, or what I can do to make it look beautiful again.
“I don’t know how often I’ve painted these walls. The white has been in here now for two years, and that’s an amazing length of time. I might keep the white. Maybe I’m getting older? Toning down a bit?”
Unlikely. It’s hard to imagine Mel getting quieter. With her six children, six grandchildren, her perpetual projects, her pin-tidy home (despite the children and the projects), her op-shop and church work, she’s quite the force. She and husband Steve got together at 15 and were married by 18. Seventeen years ago, they moved into the Foxton house — it looked a bit different then.
“The kids were all screaming, ‘We’re not moving into that ugly house!’ The same owners had been in here for the past 60 years, and it was all overgrown and in a sad state. Even the real estate agent tried to talk us out of it because of the work, but I could see the potential in it, big time. There was a lot of space, and it had such a nice feeling,” she says.
It doesn’t take much to breathe new life into an old piece or change its look. Here are some of Mel’s main moves.
♦ Use fabrics to create patterns and texture. “Lie a lace tablecloth on a surface and spray-paint over the top. Carefully peel off the cloth and varnish the wood.” Mel has also sewn doilies onto armchairs.
♦ Use masking tape. Masking tape makes easy work of painting straight lines. “I love the look of natural wood against whitewash,” says Mel. “I like taking off the masking tape and seeing the whole effect coming off clean. You can get a whole new look just with masking tape.”
♦ Preserve photos in oil. Mel has a wedding photo in a jar of oil in her bedroom. “It sounds odd, but it stops fading and is more interesting than putting it in a frame.”
♦ Innersprings as photo-holders. Photos can also be fitted into mattress innersprings once the foam has been extracted. (Mel’s mattress has found new life in the garden, with a creeper growing up it.)
♦ Chalk paint. Mel makes chalk paint (which can be used on furniture to create a milky or distressed look) as it’s expensive. Add two teaspoons of tile grout to 500ml of standard acrylic paint. “That works well for me,” she says.
♦ Go green. Mel often uses artificial plants to add green to a room.
“I’m not overly great with the real ones. They tend to die on me. And the artificial ones can look so realistic. I get excited when I get a new one.”
♦ Think outside the box. Not everything needs
“to be attacked with a paint brush — it can be transformed in the way you dress it. Let the imagination run wild.”
As Mel and Steve’s house has only three bedrooms, not all her projects remain at home. Some are given away, others are sold for a meagre profit. She now sells via her Facebook page, Mel’s Unique Boutique, or the Op Stop, the op-shop she and daughters Kate and Hope run attached to their church in Levin. Or she hangs up a sign on her fence and puts her wares out on the berm, a quick turn off State Highway One at Foxton. “It’s amazing how many people stop. I put a pair of chairs out the other day, and they sold within 15 minutes.”
The price tag is paltry. “It barely covers my costs, certainly not the hours I’ve put in,” says Mel. But whatever she makes is used to buy bags of groceries for families in the community who could do with some support.
“The families have no idea we’re coming [with the groceries], which is nerve-wracking as we’re walking into a place uninvited. There was one lady who was so taken aback she looked quite disturbed, but I went up and cuddled her and she wouldn’t let go. I could do that every day of the week. The joy on some of their faces — they’re overwhelmed by someone’s generosity.”
People are generous to Mel, too, gifting her pieces so that she can apply her magic to them. Old tables, chairs — even just the legs of tables and chairs — glory boxes that have lost their glory; anything she can sand and paint into new life.
Her floor was perhaps her biggest project. It’s been whitewashed, square by square, in a facsimile of linoleum tiles. “I wouldn’t do that again,” she says. “The floor had old-fashioned lino on it, which was an awful thing to get rid of. We had to rip it up, then scrape and burn off the tar underneath. That was an ugly job. Then I spent weeks on my knees with a little detail sander. After that, Steve went ahead of me, masking in the squares and I came behind whitewashing. Then we varnished over it.”
Another ugly job was crafting the beautiful, moss-green tasselled lampshade. “I don’t swear, and making that lampshade made me swear,” she says, with a “never again” glare at the shade.
There’s certainly a lot of whitewash in the Cowan home’s current incarnation. “I love whitewash, and I love that French look. But I like heaps of looks, and I like it jumbled up, all eclectic together. I like every look but cottage. I did like cottage years ago, but I think I overdid it.”
Mel is now being asked by others to decorate their homes. “It’s hard work but the expressions on their faces when they see it finished — they love it, so I just love doing it.”
While it means she’s less likely to pick up another paintbrush when she gets home, there’s no way another painter would get near her house. “I couldn’t even imagine it. The thought of someone else painting my windows? Oh my goodness, no. They might get it on the glass, do a bad job, and I’d have to pay them. No, no.”