bloor and bathurst graffiti

This was one of my favorite landmark bits of graffiti in Toronto, painted on the doors of a former church just south of Bloor on Bathurst. I saw it every time I drove downtown with Brainerd, my former employer, for a business meeting. Our former publicist also had an office right near this intersection.

Other sense memories associated with this graffiti: Roti. (Roti Palace - one of my favorite Toronto restaurants - was steps away from this spot.)

dandelion mud pie

This was one of my favorite neighbourhood stores when I lived in Toronto. Dandelion Mud Pie sold eco-friendly items for your home. I remember it always smelled amazing inside - like the lavender room spray they sold there. This is their window display in April 2008.

narcissi still life

Okay, so here are a few junky things assembled to make a temporary still life one February a couple of years ago. The narcissi are growing in a glass bowl filled with marbles and river stones. The wooden stretcher was rescued from a former client's garbage pile. I thought it made an interesting accent in the only window in my Toronto apartment.

orange crate side table

I have no idea if this is really an orange crate. It's definitely some kind of crate. When my brother and sister and I were little, my dad took this crate, turned it on its end and added a couple of shelves. Then my mom painted it mint green and drew electric stove elements on the "top" with black magic marker. Presto magicko, it became a toy stove for us to play with.

Years later as a teenager I painted it white, and it's been used as some sort of furniture ever since - whether on its end as a shelf, or on its side (above) as an occasional table. As I write this, it's now part of my wall o' shelves.

replica vintage clock

Okay, technically this clock wasn't a curb surfing find. I lived in a multi-unit apartment building in Toronto a few years ago, and tenants would leave stuff they no longer wanted in the laundry room for other tenants to take. Early one morning when I went down to do laundry, I found this cool replica of a vintage clock.

Unfortunately, after I took it back up to my apartment and cleaned it up, I decided I didn't want to keep it because it was too blue. (I was kind of into monochrome off-white at the time. Kind of still am.) So within a week it made its way back down to the laundry room, to be picked up by somebody else...

junk style christmas tree

I'm not a big fan of decorations at any time of year, but perhaps even less so at Christmas. It's not that I'm a Scrooge - I love the time of the winter solstice, and the symbolic return of the light celebrated in the Christian tradition. But I definitely don't go in for Christmas trees, lights, or any of the other knick-knacks that many people seem to love.

The second Christmas I lived in Toronto, however, I felt the need for some special THING in my apartment to mark the season. I found a small branch on one of my walks and, inspired by Tibetan prayer flags and various other rituals, decided to "decorate" my branch with paper slips upon which were written the qualities I wished to develop in the coming year. Things like discipline. (To be honest, that's the only one I can remember. Apparently I didn't wish to develop memory. Just saying.)

Anyhow, I offer my Christmas prayer tree as an example of what you can do with found objects to create unique seasonal decorations for your home.

(The pot, by the way, was a gift a couple of Christmases earlier from a client of mine. Her daughter had painted it. I treasured it until it broke.)

good-bye chairs

My name is Michelle Lynne Goodfellow, and I have a chair fetish. Well, probably not. That is - if fetishes have anything to do with sex. Although... never mind.

But anyhow... I have a chair addiction, I guess. I can't stop buying chairs. And recently I've decided I need to get rid of some of my stuff, and the obvious place to start (because I have so many of them) seems to be there.

Above are two cream-coloured kitchen chairs I got from my local Goodwill back in the fall. I love the way they look - they were perfect in my kitchen when I brought them home - but they really aren't in great shape. A male guest sat in one of them for about an hour one night... and he experienced rung fail.

So I decided to put them out on Sunday afternoon (the day before garbage day this week; London's garbage pick-up rotates on a six-day schedule), and before I carried them to the road, I took these pictures. Also decided to get rid of another chair... but more on that in a minute.


I loved the way the late afternoon sunlight diffused as it sifted through the air of my front room.








These chairs had some of my favorite features, including rough undersides and amateur repairs.




I love the brushmarks of paint on the underside of the seat.










Natural patina...






One of my own botched repair jobs - after one of the cats knocked the chair over and broke a rung outright.


Loose joints...




So below is the other chair - one that a Toronto friend of mine found at the side of the road in Riverdale. I loved the bones of this mid-20th century teak chair so much that I took it home, even though the seat was a mess.


I painstakingly pulled up an old upholstery job, and cut away the original caning on the seat. All the upholsterer's tacks gashed my knuckles as I spent hours trying to pull them up too.




Actually, on second thought I think the wood is beech. But what do I know?


In the end I gave up and replaced the seat with some old plywood boards, cut to size. (Not seen here.) If I didn't have a dearth of space, I'd probably keep this chair around just for the beauty of its worn edges...