Shipwreck Furniture: Salvaged Boat Wood Transformed

Found via: Apartment Therapy

South African designer Nic Kruger fashions these beauties from salvaged shipwrecks. Check out the rest of their stuff at Shipwreck Furniture

Bean Rocker

I stumbled across these cool chairs called beanrockers a while back and loved them so much I decided to make one for my daughter. The originals are from a company called Knoend:

Here's there one I made out of pine:

Denis Milovanov - Solid wood furniture

Found this via the Contemporist website. Solid wood furniture made by Russian woodworker Denis Milovanov...very cool.

Tool for making seedling pots from newspaper

How awesome is this little tool for making seedling pots from newspaper!
Found via Unconsumption

Pot Maker, Gardening Supplies and Garden Tools at Burpee.com
This nifty eco-friendly mold transforms strips of ordinary newspaper into biodegradable seed-starting pots you plant right in the garden. No more trays and pots to buy, wash and store. Hardwood form lasts for years. A real money-saver.

Lauren Milroy's Pencil Sandals

How cool are these?
found at DudeCraft

"Lauren Milroy recently graduated with a MS in Design from Stanford University. Before Stanford she attended the University of Southern California, where she received a BS in Mechanical Engineering. She worked for several years as lead engineer in the aerospace industry before leaving the technical to focus on her creative inclinations at Stanford. She is currently interested in the relationship between people and the things they own — how do the objects we own define our identity?"

Dining room table from drift wood

I've been looking around for some stuff to post on my newly minted blog and came across these pics of a dining room table myself and my girlfriend, Caroline built for her mom. We found the wood for the legs one day whilst walking up the beach, not too sure what type of wood it is but it had a strange smell to it once cut, almost like a coconut husk. We did hear stories of a cargo ship that lost some timber in rough seas not far from where we were but couldn't confirm it. Someone had tried to make a fire with the one end, no doubt a fisherman trying to keep warm on a cold night.

Caroline getting stuck in

Me doing my bit

The day we carried it back home we bumped into one of the local residents who said that she had also spotted that same piece of wood and was trying to figure out a way to retrieve it. Luckily we picked it up first, although it wasn't easy carrying a whole friggin tree trunk 2 kilometers down the beach and back to Caroline's moms house. I used some scrap 2 x 4 planks for the frame and Caroline's mom bought 2 boards of pine for 300 bucks that we use for the table top.

Was a bit of a mission trying to cut the legs so that they all stood level considering that the trunk was bent to one side. I used a piece of string to measure the length from top to bottom and tried cutting it as square as possible. Turned out pretty sturdy in the end. I didn't use any Mortise or Tenon joints, bolted the legs to the frame and screwed the table top down. The holes for the screws were countersunk and filled with wood filler.
We sanded it down and varnished it with a clear coat. Only took us a couple of hours from start to finish and I think it turned out really nice.

Our driftwood dining room table in all it's glory