Stop Me Before I DIY Again - Gardenista
There was a time when glue gun novices like me did not believe ourselves capable of whipping up a custom silverware drawer insert on a lark. But now, with a few clicks, you can buy pretty much any sort of craft supply, including tarnish-resistant fabric by the yard (in six colors). My thrift-shop flatware drawer, before my intervention. But when I phoned for information, I learned that before I could even get a price estimate... Photograph by Mimi Giboin. ...I would have to make photocopies of every different kind of flatware piece I owned—dinner fork, salad fork, soup spoon, teaspoon, and knife. Photograph by Mimi Giboin. My overflow china cabinet drawers awaiting their rehab. I suppose I could have left the messy jumble alone, and I considered that. But then I had a conversation with a silverware expert—designer Sue Fisher King, who owns an eponymously named housewares store in San Francisco—and she assured me that to do nothing would lead to disaster. Photograph by Mimi Giboin. In my kitchen, where my fancy flatware lives, I have a custom silverware box lined in a cheerful apple green anti-tarnish cloth. It’s a phenomenon that fascinates researchers like Colin Williams, a public policy professor in England who recently surveyed 5,500 people in the UK town of Sheffield to try to get to the bottom of our growing belief that we can—and should—do everything for ourselves by ourselves. The inevitable result has been to transform mild mannered people like me into rabid DIY-ers. Photograph by Mimi Giboin. My fancy flatware (inherited from my husband’s family) is coddled already, in a kitchen drawer. My kitchen looked like the operating room in that Grey’s Anatomy episode where the patient who is turning into a tree has to have his branches removed surgically. Photograph by Mimi Giboin. My overflow china cabinet, where my thrift-shop silver lives. The project went the way of most DIYs, with my mood following the same emotional trajectory as the five stages of grief identified by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. Post-DIY; my thrift shop silver drawers. As after childbirth, the hellish memory was fading in the face of my love for my creation. What a pretty, mossy-green color. Photograph by Michelle Slatalla.