A cool DIY wire coffee table project

I've been on the lookout for DIY coffee table ideas for a while — we have a great glass top, but the curly cast iron base that came with it wasn't made for use by a piratical first mate who likes to rest his feet on everything within five feet of the futon. Right now we have two chairs stuck underneath the glass top as a makeshift coffee table, which ... is functional. That's about all I can say about that.

Anyway, since it's not falling apart or unstable, we're not in a giant rush to spend money on a new coffee table base, but it's pretty high on the list of DIY improvements I want to make to the house, since I prefer my DIY projects to be attractive as well as usable. ;) My criteria for the new, improved DIY coffee table base include that it should:

• hold the glass top securely enough that none-so-gentle cats and feet atop it won't make the table wobble;
• be attractive;
• have storage space beneath it; and preferably
• be fairly easy to move, since the room in which the coffee table resides doubles as the Wii-playing room.

Today I found a tutorial from Lowe's that looks like it meets pretty much all these criteria — behold! The wire deck coffee table tutorial!

Okay, I'm not sure it'd be that easy to move around, but it doesn't look particularly harder to move around than anything else. And one of the awesome things about this project is that it requires only three things, and no tools: wire deck, cable ties, and acrylic sheet (which you can have cut to measure at the home improvement store). I guess wire deck is what it looks like, which is some kind of shelving component. And even cooler (at least for me)? Technically, I could probably scrounge all the materials for this out of what we have on hand right now — we have wire shelving, cable ties, and that glass table top I keep blathering about.

I am so tempted to try this. But it would require disassembling some of my existing shelves and I doubt they'd make a coffee table of the height we want anyway, so I'd probably want to get some new wire deck to do it with. According to their Web site, my local Lowe's doesn't seem to have the right size of wire deck to make the bottom part (snort — that's a little perverse), but assuming I can find it somewhere locally at comparable prices, it looks like getting the wire deck would cost well under $50, including tax. That sounds like a fairly good deal on a pretty cool DIY coffee table base. So. Tempted.

Yeah, the temptation might be a passing fancy ... but then again, maybe the idea will ferment in my head with some other ones and produce an even better DIY coffee table base idea. Only time will tell. ;)

Crafting the craft show

Every craft booth needs a banner. We're hoping to do a few shows this holiday season, and there's one coming up that's got a "green" theme, in the eco-friendly/sustainable sense. The application form suggested that crafters make their banner or shop sign out of recycled materials to show off their creativity, so since we don't have a banner yet, I thought I'd take their suggestion. A photo from today's bannercrafting:


The letters are cut out of an old towel that we dyed purple in the washer. There's also a big yellow towel-fabric ampersand that will go on the final banner, and all the towel cutouts will be stuck to a background cut out of a linen tablecloth we got from the thrift store. Our actual tablecloth came from the thrift store, too, and if the tablecloth turns out not to cover the tables completely, we have some white thrifted bed-sheet on standby. Recycley enough?

Make your own needle felting tool!

This is super cool. :D I love making me own stuffage ... hurrah. ;D