Hacking Ikea

Winnie Lam was thinking about food when she made her Chocolate Sundae Toppings footstool, fashioned from a few bags of cotton pompoms hot-glued to an Ikea stool. “It came from staring into a bowl of ice cream one day,” said Ms. Lam, 31, who lives in Mountain View, Calif., and is a product manager at Google. “I’m a chocolate lover, but I’d rather look at it than eat it.”

Alex Csiky, a 43-year-old guitar maker in Windsor, Ontario, was
focused, as he always is, on blowing a raspberry at the guitar-making
industry while at the same time making a great sound when he built his
sleek blond electric guitar from an Ikea pine tabletop.

Meanwhile,
Christine Domanic, 28, an artist who was living at the time in
Philadelphia, found the inspiration for her rolling bench in the sex
ads in the back of city magazines. Her endearing Wiener Bench — a
wooden bench festooned with fat pink crocheted tubes — was made from an
old Ikea side table, the yarn from 60 used sweaters and the stuffing
from a sofa left on her street on trash day.