Each year at Art For All, the Fairfield Primary School art show, there is a chair auction.  Parents paint, upholster or re-imagine chairs that are then auctioned off, with all the proceeds going to the school.  I like to do something different every year.  One year I made a map stool.  It had the local Melways map on it.  Another year I produced the tablecloth chair. A month or two ago I noticed a table in a home magazine made of books.

It looked something like this book stool/bench above which I subsequently found online.  And while I was searching online I also found this amazing chair.   I was inspired. This week I remembered to look for books when we delivered the rubbish from my sisters farm to the local tip and struck it lucky.  Did you know that at small town country tips such as Cavendish (my sisters local) and Dunkeld (up the road) they have  a room of reusable things such as books and magazines, homewares etc. that are free, and you can just rock up and help yourself?  Free-cycling is part of the small town local tip ethos in Australia.

So, I collected all these lovely hard back books (I chose them by colour and size) and I am planning/hoping to make a long single-row-of-books bench seat from them.  I am now looking out for what to use as the ends to press them together.  And I will buy long threaded metal rods from the hardware store and talk to my Dad about drilling and bolts (he’s got a shed full of tools and bits and pieces).  I think it will look super fun (and be useful). I hope my friend Katrina (with her blog booksaremyfavouriteandbest) thinks it is OK (although on her blog she admits freely that she writes in her books as she reads them so she can’t be too picky).  My partner has already objected to the idea of drilling through literature and has also pilfered a yellow book to read – he better read it quickly as I need it back!  I don’t have any other yellow books in my collection.