05 June,2021 06:17 AM IST | Mumbai | Phorum Dalal
Samtani decorated tabletops with coins. Pics/Bipin Kokate
Work from home felt like a major change in the early months of the lockdown last year. Slowly, monotony set in and people started missing their coffee breaks, canteen banter and having a boss in the next cubicle to help meet deadlines. But there is also another side to it. Take inspiration from four Mumbaikars who are using the extra time to put their creative side to work.
Chef Ambar Samtani had a bag full of coins lying around at home. "Being in the hospitality industry, we are often short of change. I always have a coin collection handy," says the corporate chef at Mumbai International Airport and chef at The Village Shop café in Bandra. In the lockdown, he stuck them, along with a mix of vintage coins from his grandfather's collection, onto the top of a side table with a glue gun. He placed a glass top on it. Samtani says, "I am always fidgeting with things in the house. This one was easy to execute and adds a pretty corner to a room."
Sonia Narula, a 26-year-old interior designer, took to creating terrarium plants after following DIY videos on YouTube. "Schezwan sauce bottles and a little moss from our garden were all it took to start. It lifts the energy of my work desk," says Narula, who also revisited her interior-designing skills and created a tray using cement. "I mixed cement with water, and used a steel plate as a base. I kept it out to dry for 48 hours and then painted it." But her favourite project has been painting doors and walls using chalk paint, acrylic and oil paints. "These changes give my home a café-like vibe," she says.
Medha Inamdar, a professional baker, learnt the importance of upcycling early on in life. "My mother always encouraged me to make things out of waste," says Inamdar, who collected cardboard boxes that came with deliveries to create a small table for her mother's birthday last year. "I used newspapers, clippings and stacked the cardboards into layers to create a usable decorative item," says the Nerul resident, who also re-imagined a few other things in the house, including upcycling a tea-packaging box into a key box and painting an old shoe rack and adding some accents to it.
Currently, she is reviving her godmother's photo frames to give them a modern ethnic look. "My family was convinced it was a new buy," she adds. Offering a few tips, she says that she prefers to beautify her home using existing items and craft material lying around in the house. You don't really need to buy expensive material for craftwork, she says. Pick a mithai box or good-quality cardboard jewellery boxes and convert them into something that has utility and looks good too. "As for craft material, I find that air-dry clay, cardboard and chalk paints are enough to make a lot of items. One just needs a creative mind."
When a bed needed refurbishment and its edges smoothened, marketing and hospitality professional Zamir Khan stepped up to the plate. "At any other time, my life would have been too busy, but with the lockdown, I decided to put my carpentry skills to work. Being an army kid, we studied carpentry at school," says Khan, who cordoned off the bedroom area, put up plastic sheets to keep the dust under control, and got to work.
It took 12 days to give the bed a Victorian sky-blue finish. "This phase is teaching us to value the small joys of life and taking this up as a project felt great," says Khan, who also polished and repainted a shoe rack, which he turned into a project to engage his four-year-old daughter, Amaraah, along with giving a wall in her room a chalk-paint finish to unleash her artistic streak. "I'm just refurbishing another cabinet [in emerald green] and am in the process of repainting the entire master bedroom. It seems like we won't need to hire a carpenter anymore," he laughs.
