Coffee sack art

Inspired by all the coffee sack craft I've noticed around the blogs lately, like this lovely footstool from Kootoyou, I thought I'd show you something I made with them a while ago.

When we renovated our kitchen a few years ago we had a wall that could do with some decoration and I wanted to make something to hang on it. I decided to do a homage to coffee. As the Mr works with coffee, we both like drinking it and a sizable proportion of the new bench space would be taken up with the machine and accessories, I thought this was a fair call!



So I came up with the idea of painting on coffee sacks. I bought them for about $2 each from a great local place called Reverse Garbage who take in donations of packaging and materials from local businesses that are no longer needed and sell them to the public as art materials of whatever. Then I bought a couple of cheap canvases from a local $2 shop, stretched a single layer of coffee sack material ('hessian' or 'burlap') over the front surface and used a staple gun to secure it at the back.



Next I used acrylic paints in shades of green, beige and white (to work in with the kitchen colours) and with a small foam roller I rolled out random geometric shapes until I was happy with the design. The hessian turned out to be a nice surface to paint on, though it's so coarse that I don't think I'd try and intricate design as it would be hard to get much detail in.



I left some of the bare coffee sack showing so that you could still tell what it was, and mounted the canvases side by side. It was a fun project to do and I've enjoyed them, but 3 years on I'm a bit tired of the design so I think I'll paint something over the top, maybe trying some different colours this time.