Modern Rocker
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
