By Dawn Swann
Custom-made furniture, art, antiques, and accessories.
60 Nobscot Road, Sudbury; www.60nobscot.com or www.sherbornwoodworks.net 978 440-8066.
After leaving his job distributing music software in California, Ray Bachand turned his woodworking hobby into his profession. Bachand opened 60nobscot a year and a half ago in a converted barn, retaining some of the stalls as display space for art and for his one-man custom furniture business, Sherborn Woodworks.
Bachand prefers to work with recycled wood, such as the remains of demolished houses and lumberyard scraps. He takes delight in spotting shapes in the grain of the wood and incorporating them into the finished product. One rough piece of cherry bears the likeness of a horse; another piece, the figure of a dolphin. A whorl in a finished coffee table reminds me of the Aerosmith logo. Seeking out these images is akin to solving the magic-eye puzzles in the Sunday comics.
Bachand uses traditional joinery, like mortise and tenon, and mostly hand tools. Planning and chiseling take up much of his time. Favoring simple, elegant, clean lines, Bachand draws on a variety of styles: Shaker, Arts and Crafts, Mission, and Early American Primitive. He uses a nontoxic paint made from milk protein, lime, and earth pigments mixed with water.
Bachand will build any piece, so long as it is freestanding, such as islands, tables, cabinets, and shelving. When I visited, he was constructing a Colonial-style cabinet to house a giant flat-screen TV, one of his more elaborate projects. It usually takes him four to six weeks to make a piece. And he guarantees it will be unique: Bachand doesn’t like to build the same thing twice.
$500 for accessory tables to $3,000 or more for bigger pieces, such as hutches and media cabinets.
Antiques as well as photography, pottery, silk flowers, quilts, and paintings by regional artists and artisans. Among the artists is Judi Sunday, known as the “bag lady” of Cape Cod because she paints on recycled surfaces such as brown paper bags.
By Clara Silverstein
Toss pillows made from old flour sacks and other fabrics.
Hudson, Wellesley, 61A Central St., Wellesley, 781 239-0025, www.Hudsonboston.com
Owner Jill Goldberg, whose store carries a variety of home furnishings, recycles flour sacks, feed bags, and tea towels into toss pillows. Goldberg finds her fabrics at flea markets or through dealers who know her work. Most of the pillows use a swatch from the original on white cotton backing. Faded words might advertise Kellogg’s or Purina, or a calendar from 1958. The filling is down.
“Even before I opened the store, I was a textile hoarder,” says Goldberg, who grew up in Wellesley and studied at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in Los Angeles. She opened her first store in the South End two years ago and the second in Wellesley in March.
The pillows are one of a kind. Customers especially like the calendar-year tea towels. “They find a personal attachment, especially if they find one from the year they were born,” says Goldberg. Above all, the pillows are meant to be playful. “Sometimes design can be so serious. These add a little fun.”
$125 to $175 per pillow
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