Though she’s consumed with studying 19th- century British novels for her dissertation, Columbia University grad student Anna Wulick still manages to look to the next century: the designers of the 1950s.
During a recent apartment “update,” she noticed the faux velvet riding toy someone had given her 2-year-old daughter. She ripped off the purple snail top to discover an elegant, minimalist rocker underneath. A hands-on crafter since high school, Wulick “will launch in to do almost anything for which I can reasonably approximate the necessary equipment.”
Using a heavy canvas from the As-Is bin at Ikea, she deftly reworked the gaudy toddler toy into a streamlined ride. “I hadn’t done upholstery before,” she says, “but I figured it was reasonably intuitive — you know, sew fabric around this object.” Not that Wulick’s new field of toy upholstery was an easy one. “This rocker is designed fairly poorly, so in order to upholster it, I basically had to sew the fabric right onto it by hand.” The end result would look
right at home in Alvar Aalto’s nursery.
So how does someone who relishes working with her hands balance that with hours staring at the page? Crafting and writing “are actually quite a nice refuge from each other,” Wulick admits. The “delayed gratification” of spending years on a dissertation contrasts with the “almost instant results” of crafting, whether it’s making paintings for her Etsy shop, Forty-Two Roads, or reupholstering office chairs for her home. Plus, “both do require a lot of attention to detail and the ability to plan ahead, so I guess some of the skills overlap,” Wulick notes.
And there may be something in the self-reliant cultural attitudes of Wulick’s 19th-century subjects that inspires her handiwork. “Whenever I think of something I want, I tend to just assume that I can make it myself rather than buy it. I love working with my hands so much that the process itself is probably my favorite part of any project.”
—Arwen O’Reilly Griffith
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