puys + dolls

who could resist that title? not me, apparently, even if I did actually use red lentils for these spindly little fellas. they were made in the nick of time (read: started the night before the party, finished a half hour before we were meant to be there) for ava's double-birthday galpals sofia and amelie.

I've never made a doll before but I knew it was something I could do with things I already had on hand: spare fabric bits, buttons, embroidery thread and something to stuff them with. you could use little tiny brown beans (uncooked, natch) but since I don't eat beans as a general rule and didn't have any dry ones in the house, I relied upon the humble lentil for stuffing. also, I had a kids toy badge-making machine from boots I'd been wanting to try out for something.

in the beginning, I was aiming to make one of them look vaguely catlike and the other somewhat rabbit-like. but before then, way back when I pondered making these dolls for somebody one day, I thought they'd be girl cats wearing '60s dresses and patent boots, and each would be gripping a fab bag. and they'd have good boufy bobbed hair. and in addition to their dolls the birthday girls would each get a sixties a-line dress and bag of their own that matched their doll's outfit! that would've been pretty cool! alas, it was a bit ambitious to do all that in a night, so they ended up wearing what they were born in - green velvet and barkcloth for the cat, tapestry for the rabbit.

the first thing I did was cut a pattern out of brown kraft paper - I used the same general outline for both dolls and the same cutout for both front and back (and just changed the ears when I did the cutting). these dolls are floppy two-piece beanbag affairs and I didn't bother with putting in seams to give them curves or let their legs sit out neatly at 90-degree angles. I didn't give them butts to sit on or protruding noses, but all that can be done if you use darts, curved edges on the back panel that don't exactly match the front, or a seam down the middle front. I may experiment with that in the future.

it's easiest if you sew the buttons on for eyes and nose and do any facial stitching before you sew the front and back together. stitch the two sides together inside-out, leaving a half-inch seam which should then be cut with pinking shears or overlocked. I did an overlock stitch to give the seams a bit of extra strength. don't forget to cut a little nip in along the curves and cut the fabric very close if you have corners, so it doesn't bunch along the curves when you turn it right side out. also, don't forget to leave about a three-inch opening so you have a way to turn it right side out again and have a place to put the stuffing in.

this is the step I'll do differently next time - I left the opening in the side of the dolls. but when it came time to fill the dolls up with lentils, every time I turned the doll to stuff a limb, the lentils would slide right out of the limb I'd just done. it took forever! next time I will leave the opening in the head, pour the lentils in the top and let gravity be my friend. also, next time I will make the pattern for the arms and legs a bit wider, I didn't expect their limbs to come out so skinny.

the last step was to bust out the badgemaker and voila, finished wabbity and feline dolls ahoy!

say it with cake

need a homefashioned gift on the quick that's every bit as fab to make as to receive? I am here to recommend mix-in-a-jar for your giftgiving needs. if you're a baking sort, you'll have everything on hand already. if not, all the ingredients are easy and inexpensive to score. you can score big mason or jam jars at ikea, from ebay, from your local five and dime store, hardware store, haus of catering supplies or even freecycle, where I scored jam jars on one occasion (and later properly met the lovely woman I got them from again when she was sitting in the cafe with a good friend of mine, turns out they were in the same NCT group together, is it a small world or what?).

so with the cake-in-a-jar it's not only about speed but presentation. you basically just layer all the dry ingredients in the jar, pick a piece of fabric or ace paper to wrap around and tie to the top, add an instruction tag and decorate the jar. I used a 1953 house and garden mag for these.

I chose recipes that were easy but also fit the folks getting the gift - the first was for a housewarming where vegans would be snarfing the goods, so I went for the tried-and-true wacky cake variation I always make - 3 cups flour, 2/3 cup dutch cocoa, 2 cups sugar, 2 tsp baking soda layered in the jar, filled to the top with vegan dark choc chips. for the second couple I changed the choc chips to dairy and as the jar was a bit taller I also included a stack of cupcake papers wrapped in plastic inside. this recipe is handy because it uses one pan and there aren't a whole bunch of extra steps, I always hope this means people will use the mix one day and then keep the jar for other stuff.

make sure you then attach a tag listing what wet ingredients are needed and how long/at what temp to cook everything, and robert is your cake-inhaling uncle. recipes that call for choc chips or nuts are good to use because you can adjust on the fly for the size of the jar, nobody will notice if there are a few more or less of these. bear in mind that if your recipe calls for chocolate chips, it's thoughtful to go that extra mile and include extra chips for the recipient to snack upon as they wield spoon - do unto others and all that.

craft night 2 - electric machine boogaloo

we had us another craft night, wahoo! I started making a pillow for maria's birthday, got the flowers all cut out but didn't get the case finished, and by now it's late, oops. the lateness of a gift from me is more my signature than the handstamped craft ho label. but at least it's started, and there's nada like having a craft night to get a fire under my butt to keep on keeping on with the crafting.

this time there was a heap of drawing + painting going on, also some stitchery of buttons on jacket, drawstrings on bags, zippers on pouches. we had bookmaking - not of the betting variety but of the handsome-babe-scrapbooking and bookbinding-from-scratch variety. jenn's 'practice' book looked better than any of the for-real books that I've made, she's got a total knack for it. there was knitting and making fancy felt fleurs for future fashion frippery (aka FFFFFF).

and there were savory pies. and cupcakes - not specifically a craft, but handywork of a sort, and crafters need fuel! I'm hoping to host these nights on a monthly basis from now on.

blood, sweat and lipstick

another birthday, another pillow, and a big one this time! I spent ages poring over the fabric trying to decide which colours were best suited for vicky's environs, the fabric is a long strip of coloured semicircles facing each other in an asymmetrical path along the bolt.

with the memory of bleeding on christina's pillow not yet hazy, I pushed the sewing accident envelope even further this time - I had finished sewing the two sides together, turned the case inside-out, stuffed the pillow form inside and just then the girls unleashed a startling wail as if being murdalised, I looked up quickly and boom, there was a long smear of red lipstick along the edge on the beige corner! I scrubbed at it but it wouldn't come out. but then I realised the case was a bit loose anyway, so I took out the innard, turned the case inside-out again and brought the seam in all the way around by about an inch. voila, lipstick-be-hidden! and there will always be a little bit of mac dubonnet in her seams, the artiste's signature.

I spent a lot of time staring at the fabric at first, wondering which grouping of colours to use. but it turned out okay and fit right in with their other pillows and their ace paul catherall prints!

bring on the loot bags

next to the cupcakes and the witty banter, making party bags has got to be the bestest thing about hosting a birthday shindig for the younguns. some people dread party bag duty but I love putting them together! if you're a dreader instead of an embracer, you might be happy to buy a bunch of plastic bags emblazoned with balloons or clowns or whatever and fill them with job lot plastic trinkets from the pound shop and be done with it. and so be it, you won't find me judging you, respect for even hosting a party, you know? I'm not about all this party favour pressure that I hear about, isn't it enough that you're hosting the thing and working out food and how to keep everybody occupied? you've got ten gazillion other things to worry about on the day and let's face it, my gals would very happily play with a neon pink plastic whistle for several hours, blowing it over and over and over again until that tragic moment when they get bored or I smash it with a hammer, whichever comes first. so I'm saying right now I reckon the kids don't give a toss, the homemade party bag challenge is for me. the plastic trinkets route just isn't my way, mainly because I really like making stuff, since I had the nippers I don't get enough crafting time in, and I have this thing about forking out money for cheap plastic things kids (parents with hammers?) are going to break two seconds after they get home, I just can't justify it. so here are some party bag ideas for the borrowing, should you find yourself wanting to save moulah, get crafty and still give good favour.

way back when ava turned two, we had a joint birthday party with her pal finlay, they were born five days apart and all the same people would be going to both parties if we had separate ones, so we've always combined them. this party had a music theme - a guitar-shaped pinata for the bashing, a singalong of all the kiddie hits, dancing and all that jazz. of course I volunteered straightaway to do the cupcakes and the party bags, hoo doggy! for this one, the loot bags were made by folding tea towels from ikea in half (12p each in a sale the year before, score! I knew I'd do something with them someday) and stitching up the sides, adding twine for handles and stitching a guitar on the front that was cut out of any old vintage fabric scraps I had lying about. can't draw a guitar, or much of anything else? use a cookie cutter as a template. we've still got a few of these bags hanging around the house, in use by big people and little people alike. they're great for stashing things in - makeup, playmobil people, fave cookie cutters and small kitchen utensils, crayons, etc.

so I had the bag, but what to put in? lemme tell you, mix CD-Rs are always a good loot bag giftie, you can do them on the cheap and the kids dig 'em. my co-host jacqui was taking care of this contribution to the bag, she did copies of her son's fave singalong CD. as for the rest of the bag, I decided on homemade playdough. it's so easy to make! I got a heap of little plastic containers to put them in (scored cheap on ebay from a restaurant supply shop) and every party bag got two tubs of diff colours. even the homemade stuff keeps for ages if you stash it in the fridge. I included a card with the recipe so everybody could make more when they wanted, and a couple of cookie cutters each (also scored butt cheap in bulk from ebay). note that this stuff smells great when you use a recipe that calls for vanilla, but it's loaded with salt so don't let the munchkins chow down on it!

make playdough!

3 cups flour

1.5 cups salt

6 tsp cream of tartar

3 tbs oil

3 cups water

1 tsp vanilla extract
food colouring

pour it all into a big pot and stir over medium heat until it starts to come away from the sides. take off the oven, let it cool enough to handle it and knead till smooth. jam it into airtight containers and it's playtime.

for lulu's first birthday party, we nicked a groovy bag idea from martha stewart and went the way of the pumpkin. lulu was born two days after halloween, so could we say no to the halloween birthday party? no, we could not, nor shall we in the coming years. halloween is catching on in the UK but it's not nearly the big old holiday we had in the states when I was growing up, so a halloween dress-up party was a bit of a novelty for some folks. a lot of lulu's party pals are the younger sibs of ava's posse and they were all invited too, so we had about 16 kids here rocking halloween costumes and a few adults too, spooky giddy fun was had by all.

the pumpkin bags were made using orange craft bags, twisted at the top and tied with floral tape, it gets sticky when you stretch it and it's easy to curl when you need a tendril or 20 in your life. my witchy hat goes off to whoever of martha's minions came up with this genious idea. anyhoo, this is what I filled them with:

*pack of pumpkin seeds for spring planting (garden planning ahead!)

*plastic fangs

*bag of 3 homemade pumpkin mini-muffins

*tiny bottle of mr men bubble bath (bought in bulk packs at sainsbury's + split up)

*goth rubber duckies instead of choke-hazardy fangs for the youngest partygoers

to be able to tell them apart, a tendril system was put in place - one tendril for fangs, two for duckies, three for dairy-free. I wonder if some folks didn't see the funny side of the dead duck? heck, the little crossed eyes made me laugh. our gals love 'em and they're perfect for spooky holiday bathtimes.

next up, party bags for ava's 3rd birthday this year. in addition to having a joint party with finlay as per usual, we included two other youngsters with nearby first birthdays - finlay's younger brother archie and lulu's pal isabel. so there were three adults planning the party and we divvied up tasks, once again I was happy to take on cupcakes and party bags. I also made the invites, which I'll cover in a separate post about invites one day. for this party we made the trek out to the fabulous godstone farm in surrey and hired a party barn to use as a base for lunching, resting, cake-snarfing and candle-blowing in between forays out to ooh and ahh over the newborn lambs and chat with the piggies and cows. I had a bunch of tall skinny plain coloured bags left over from those multipacks of holiday bags on sale after christmas at ikea (can you tell we live close to the svedish supastore? close enough to pounce on the sales in speedy fashion, anyway) and it was easy to decide on a farm theme for these bags, yes? so I stamped the outside of each bag with a bunny printer's block (the only animal stamp I had, unbelievable!) and a birthday cake (from a fab muji set). ava was really into sofa trampolining around this time, so I decided this year that the CD-R would be a mix of adult songs, sort of ava's sofa-jumping best-of.

here's what I put in the bags:

*bag of homemade dry mix for sugar cookies with a note about what wet ingredients to add

*animal cookie cutter (attached to outside)

*tiny box of smarties from multipack (for animal biscuit eyes!)

*couple of pages of stickers from these wonderful moo booklets

*farm animal paint sponge stamper (bulk from ebay)

*mini colour-changing rubber ducky (again with the crowd-pleasing ducks, multipacks of these were on sale in sainsbury's after christmas in the stocking-stuffer aisle)

*sofa-jumping CD (would-be-goods, b+s, free design, peter bjorn + john, smiths, stereolab, charades, orange juice, beach boys, sagittarius, jimmy rodgers, beatles, esg, kraftwerk, ernie from sesame street)

all of these party bags were done on the cheap with a view to giving the kids something they can work on later at home, usually in the kitchen because that's where I spend a fair bit of time with the gals keeping them occupied of an afternoon. I'm already cooking up ideas for what to do for lulu's 2nd birthday halloween party nearly six months away! I will be sure to report back.

pillow talk

I've been doing lots of proper freelance real-job work at night lately, so the machine-stitched hijinks have been thin on the ground since I got my new sewing machine, a lovely little computerised JL300C from john lewis. but last month there were a heap of birthdays to celebrate and since I've been trying this year to make presents instead of buying them, using stuff I already have around the house, I broke in the machine with a soft sashay into the world of throw pillows.


you see, like a lot of things, I'd had these pillow innards piled up around me in the craft room for months and years, just waiting to be used one day. for a while there, just about every time I went to ikea I'd buy five more of those little 13-inch-square blue numbers for 59p each, at that price it would have been rude not to. they're cheaper than plain old loose pillow stuffing from the haberdashery!

I'd made the birthday pillow above for my friend anna just before buying the new machine, a simple barkcloth v. velvet affair, one side each fabric, with a craft ho label sewn on at a jaunty (read crooked) angle. I'd even measured wrong so it was rectangular instead of square and it just didn't matter, the innards will mush any old way. you can whip one of these up in about 30 minutes, which suits my wait-till-the-last-minute m.o. for birthdays. but for this next lot of birthdays I decided to go a bit crazy and put two fabrics on one side, I'm nutty that way. years ago I'd bought these big coverable buttons and never used them, so I decided to use rubber stamps on a bit of fabric and cover some buttons. I only had a couple of these so for the others I used vintage buttons from the stash o' plenty. this top one was for alix, we share an amour of birdy things.







these pillows are so wee that gathering the two sides together with a button in the middle of each panel like I did for suzanne's didn't look quite the way I wanted it to - I think a bigger pillow may be needed to rock that look. so for the others I attached the button on the front and kept the back panels footloose and button-free.

I couldn't help thinking that it would've been fab if all of these had been bigger, so for the last one I did a longer pillow and stuffed it with three blue innards. but it turns out this isn't ideal, actually, as it's pretty noticeable that it's not one long pillow form inside, it buckles a bit where the separate pillow forms are mashed up against each other. we live and learn. at least I guessed correctly on the colours for christina, the blue+green turned out to match her other lounge pillows perfectly, hurrah!

I made the labels the usual way - rubber stamped with fabric ink, stitched on using a haphazard zigzag stitch. old habits die hard.

the tiny innards are the perfect size for kids' pillows and I will definitely be using them again, but for the next birthday pillow or ten I've got plans to use much bigger forms, and long single ones where needed instead of three mashed together. also I've gotta experiment with fringes, tassels, edgings, more more more buttons and different shapes! not to mention that I need to learn how to make a few thousand of these amy butler gum drops to lounge around on, they are gorgeous!

the lost weekends

yowza, has it really been september since I updated this thing? that's about how long it's been since we did anything substantial to the house, but I am still amazed and shocked. and I know my ways, I shouldn't be surprised at all.

when I last reported back, gail had departed london and in the next weeks we were coming up on the date of lulu's first birthday halloween bash. since we were having a party with 16 kiddies and about the same number of adults I was starting to panic about the kitchen floor not being in. but it's in now! marmoleum is the total business, I love it. even with leonard+jenny's international advice and encouragement I couldn't get the click installed to save my life and after hours and days of sweary exertion I gave up and called in the pros. they said it was the hardest floor they'd ever installed so I didn't feel so bad for failing. we were four tiles short! but we have procured the shortfall now and we'll get them clicked installed one day, along with the kickplates, which are next on the list. because if I accidentally kick any more legos under the cabinets the spiders are going to build a whole duplo city under there, shudder.

so I reckon I'll just post a few fill-ins to catch up on what's been going on and then resume cataloguing current projects, houselike and craftlike in nature. in the last seven months I've done party bags for birthday shindigs, hosted a craft night, played a show, got down with the gocco, fashioned some jewellery and a pillow for birthday giftolas and bought a new sewing machine that totally sings and dances. if I can find the right button on it, it may even finish the kitchen for me!

say au revoir but not goodbye

one of the sad parts of the previously mentioned sad giddy crazy busy month was bidding farewell to ma longtime pal ms gail o'hara, who had to up sticks and move back the u.s. of a. prematurely at the end of august when the home office changed the rules of the highly skilled migrant programme and she no longer qualified to be an honorary teabag. you can read about that and other way less depressing stuff on her lovely chickfactor website.

so a few of us chums pooled in together and bought her some going away booty, including a necklace from ace shoreditch shop comfort station. the necklace is beauteously busy, with lots of chains and pendants and bits that want to hang just so, and whenever I opened the box it came in, it had got all tangled and you couldn't tell how fab it would look on - it just wouldn't do. so I decided to ditch the box and try to make one that would show off the necklace sans tangles. then I figured since I was making the card too, I might as well just make a fabric card that could multitask and also be a necklace holder. here's what I ended up with.

you can make one too, it's dead easy!

1 start with a piece of fairly stiff cardboard and make a fold in it where you'd like the spine to be. for gail's card I wanted it to have two folds creating three panels, so I could fold the two panels over the necklace and there'd be no danger of the necklace slipping out through an open side.

2 once you have the cardboard sorted, pick your fabrics that you're using for front and back and lay them right side up. lay the cardboard on top of one piece of fabric and trace around it with a pen (or a white grease pencil if you're using thin or light-coloured fabric, I was using velvet and black cotton so there was no danger of the pen showing through). cut out around the rectangle you've drawn, leaving a good inch or so of extra. if you're using velvet make an extra wide border just in case, it's a bugger to sew without it shifting! lay your just-cut fabric rectangle on the other piece of fabric and cut a matching piece.

3 pin the two rectangles of fabric together with right sides facing! this is very important because basically you're sewing the seams and then turning it inside out so the seams don't show. sew along the long sides and one short side, leave one short side open for jamming the carboard in. IMPORTANT: don't sew right on the line you've drawn, instead sew a little bit outside of the line to give yourself enough room to jam the cardboard in. if you don't trust yourself to do this straight once the machine is a-chugging along, just take a ruler and draw another rectangle outside your original rectangle, 1/8 of an inch or so away, then sew on that line.

4 cut outside of your stitched lines with pinking shears, about a quarter inch away. this is to prevent fraying and isn't all that important unless you think somebody's gonna wash your card one day by mistake. turn the thing inside out and slide the cardboard in.

5 slide a piece of fuzzy wire or ribbon into the centre of the open end so it's left hanging mostly out, fold the open ends into each other and hand-stitch that side closed, so that you're left with a piece of ribbon hanging out. attach a button to the other side and wrap the ribbon around the button to close it.

I used paper, rubber stamps, paper punch, crafty corner scissors and wee safety pins to create the inside areas for folks to write messages on, mainly because I was running way behind as per usual and was using what I had at hand, which is how it should be in the crafting world. use whatever you've got to make it work for you! if I'd thought about it in advance, I might have sewn the paper onto the fabric before I stitched the front and back pieces together (you can't do it after or you won't be able to slide the cardboard in, natch). and if I'd had several months to work on it, I would've added some serious beading to those chandeliers to make them shimmer. maybe for gail's welcome back to london card? we live in hope.

on the tiles

we toyed around with the idea of doing our own tiling to save money, but quickly came to our senses and decided that like the worktops, this was something it would be way too easy for a first-timer to screw up completely. in the end we spent a hundred clams for the lovely master o' tiles graham (he also did our bathroom floor) to come and do our kitchen in an afternoon. there was a lot of cutting to be done and I'm so happy I didn't faff about with it myself getting frustrated. judging how long it's taking us to just do the floor already we'd have been still working on these tiles next christmas.

as with the pulls, ebay was our bestest buddy when it came to scoring the tiles. these are fired earth 'retro metro' tiles which retail for £90/square metre, ouch! we needed to cover 2.5 square metres so no could swing. but on ebay I found two separate sellers in the same week getting rid of the very same leftover tiles from their own refurbs, one in nearby greenwich and the other a short sunday afternoon country drive away. we got everything we needed for the kitchen for £13!

I guess now that the tiles are up there's no excuse for not finishing up the boiler boxing in, repairing/replacing/painting the t+g on the walls and working the mmmarmoleum floors. I'm itching to get everything done so we can unpack the kitchen boxes finally, mama needs to make a new batch of baby food to freeze and I have no idea where my hand blender is for the mushing. and my mini-muffin pan has gone missing! I'm sure you'll agree that that's no way to live.

up-close pulls

been meaning to post a coupla close-up pics of the pulls for a while now...

let there be light

dang, I can't believe a month has passed already! but it was a giddy sad busy month full of summer BBQs, birthday bashes, sendoff parties for fave friends leaving the country, and so much freelance work I hardly slept. there was nary a free minute to spend on updating the old baking space.

but I'm thrilled to report that after three attempts to connect the right blue wires to the right brown ones, learning about an exciting little strip of plastic called a chocabloc to seal off some unneeded earth wires, a couple of cartoonish pops at the circuit breaker and a replaced switch, we have a new ceiling light! sadly it's not one of those ace rejuvenation lamps that I know I wouldn't be able to figure out how to rewire to work in the UK. maybe one day when we do a proper kitchen refurb with new everything? a gal can dream.

no, for this go-round we've gone for a cheap and cheerful ikea number with three spots hanging. we use mostly side lighting in every room in the house and hardly ever turn on an overhead but it's nice to be able to see a bit better when you're washing dishes or peeling taters of an evening. this new light makes our kitchen alarmingly bright but on the upside, if the toaster breaks I reckon we could hold a bagel under one of these spots and it'd be done in a cool 30 seconds. the sad excuse for a ceiling lamp we had before just wasn't cutting the mustard! hereza before:



in the anything-is-better-than-what-we-had-before world of kitchen refurb, I think we've hit a winner. the new lamp cost a tenner at the swedish supastore. you're not really allowed to install anything electrical over here by yourself, so let's just say hypothetically that if you buy a light that doesn't come with an earth wire but there's an earth wire coming out of your ceiling, I have it on good authority that you can secure the wire in a little cube of chocabloc, wrap some electrical tape around it and store it in your ceiling. you may need it for a replacement lamp somewhere down the line so keep it nearby, yes?

also hypothetically, if your ceiling light is operated by just one switch in the room, what you're probably looking at coming out of your ceiling is one bundle of wires containing a green/yellow earth (not needed for our lamp), a live brown and a blue neutral (just remember 'james brown live!' so you dont' forget which is which) - in our house these are on the ring that's connected to all the ceiling lamps on that floor. the other bundle coming out of your ceiling will be from the switch - a brown live and a blue wire with a brown sheath over it, which is the international code for ALSO BEING A LIVE WIRE. it makes sense, right? it's a switch, so there's a live circuit being interrupted when you hit the switch. well, it took someone a hypothetical while to figure this out, hence the blown circuit. also the brown live from one bundle and the live blue/brown sheath wire from the switch bundle get hooked together in a junction box, they don't go into the lamp! otherwise the switch doesn't work and the light just stays on all the time. not that I'd know this from screwing it up myself a second time or anything. we got there in the end and that's what matters.

it goes without saying but I'll say it, if you ever need to replace a lamp or switch, definitely do make sure that you turn off the power at the mains!

get your coat, you've pulled

just a quick post before I hit the hay, it's late and a gal needs her beauty sleep. we didn't get the floor down yet as planned and probably won't get to it till next week so we had to schlep the washing machine back in and hook it back up for now. we moved the fridge back in temporarily as well. sometimes you gotta admit delay and do a load of laundry or two, you know?

but the painting is done, the insides of drawers and cabs are either painted or lined with paper, and I've started to put some things back on the shelves. the main accomplishment this week is not the hanging of the new ceiling lamp - I can't count that as a finished thing till I get the wiring right, after the initial mistake and an almighty pop when the circuit breaker was turned back on, I changed it and now it the light works but it just stays on forever. I may have fried the switch with the first mistake, I'll replace it tomorrow and see. no, the main accomplishment is attaching the new pulls on the drawers and cabinets, wahoo!

I found these pulls, like all good things, on ebay, from an american seller who mostly deals in vintage trailer parts. I was originally after some red or green bakelite pulls and bought a few examples to see how they'd work, but I could never score enough at once, or I'd get outbid on the truly fabulous large lots. I hadn't thought of going down the metal route, but I really fell for the stepped design of these. the seller leads me to believe that these were either previously used or intended for use on an airstream, which is only the bestest vintage rounded aluminium travel trailer ever invented. my sister in florida lives near not one but two airstream parks! imagine rows of the stunning things as far as the eye can see! they're private parks, open to residents only, but last time I was visiting her I just hadda pretend I'd taken a wrong turn into the airstream park, oops! hey, my camera just happened to be in my hands when it happened too, oops! there's an working farm over here on the isle of wight where you can hire one of five airstreams to stay in, how fab would that be? check it out: http://www.vintagevacations.co.uk/reviews.htm

but I digress. here are the drawers painted and with pulls. more pics to follow in a day or two!

husband in temporary fridge shocker

we were supposed to be going to a friend's birthday bbq yesterday and had been looking forward to it for weeks, but then both gals got sick at the same time and were miserable and cranky coughing towers o' snot, so we thought we'd better keep them at home to recoup and get in some regular napping action. the one upside to missing out on the barbie fun is that I got a chance to start painting the cupboards. (the other upside is chris made us the best mac-n-cheese I've had in years, I'll try to get the recipe to post here at some point). the below picture is with just one coat of primer - the room got bigger and brighter with every red cupboard door that bit the dust!

I haven't taken any pictures yet but I've finished all the coats of paint now on the cabs and doors and the thing I've noticed is that the combo of imperfectly cut trim and the brush painting has made them look like they've got, well, character. maybe at the start I thought I'd end up with perfectly formed shaker-style cabinets with a paint job as smooth as those lovely powder-coated ikea numbers, but honestly, have I met myself? I ended up with what you might call rustique verite. or something. as someone always drawn to the vintage bowls in the junk shop that have a repaired crack in them, I suppose this is a bit of a happy inevitability. there's absolutely no mistaking that these were done by hand and that suits me fine. nobody is ever going to look at these cabinets and ask what store I got these from, because just like on my 1950s hoosier cabinet that one or two previous owner repainted decades ago, you can see brush strokes, the odd drip mark, etc. I've read blogs where people doing a similar type refurb to me have taken their doors off the cabinets and sprayed them for a really even coating, but as mike's elderly scouse mum is fond of saying, 'that's really not my scene'.

the paint should be completely dry by tomorrow and it'll be a huge relief to get all the contents of our kitchen back in the kitchen and out of the lounge, living with everything strewn about everywhere is driving all of us insane. two things that aren't going back in just yet are the fridge (currently in the front hall) and the washing machine, both of which we've had to move out in prep for putting down the mmmarmoleum floor.

p.s. leonard+jenny if you're reading this there's every possibility I will be calling you international-style this week for live technical advice as the event happens!

boiler bloody boiler

it's been a while since I could get any work done in the kitchen due to work commitments but I'm back in the saddle, yeehaw. on the menu - boxing in of the boiler. I thought there'd be an abundance of pre-fab boiler cupboards out in the world to make this job easier, but it appears that those in the serious-about-boilers community do not recommend mass boxing in of boilers because they're worried folks won't leave enough room around it for proper ventilation. or maybe they just think boilers and pipes look pretty. I'm not in that camp, so I set to thinking about building a cabinet.

now, I don't know how to build a cabinet from scratch, but if you approach it like you're sewing, it's basically a bunch of different pieces put together in the shape you need, right? how hard can it be, right? I'll tell you what, it's harder than sewing, that's for sure. the first problem was the control box, which the central heating engineers had mounted on the wall in a very awkward spot, so it wouldn't sit completely in or out of the boiler cupboard once I'd built it. I thought I'd liberate it from that awkward spot and mount it on the side of the finished boiler cupboard. but after about a half hour of trying to figure out how to get the cover off, I then discovered a whole bunch of wires going to different screws and thought better of it. I've rewired lamps and it looks like a similar set-up - a coloured wire goes to a certain screw, but a thrift-store lamp costs a lot less than a big old boiler if I screw it up. so I'm leaving them put!

my next problem was how to approach the building of the cupboard frame, getting the right angles right and all of that. I decided to walk through the svedish supastore one afternoon before going to the big b&q warehouse across the street, just to see if ikea had any cupboards I could just adapt to my needs before buying timber and starting from scratch. ikea didn't have a cupboard, but they had these frames that are part of the basic unpainted pine ivar system and are dead cheap - score! so one of the frames I could use as is for the left side of the cabinet, but I've chopped a bit off and added some wood to make the other frame a-ok for the right side of the cabinet. I bought an ivar door for the front as well, but it's not wide enough so I'll have to do a bit of adding to it. more pictures later as I get it built.

kitchen refurb step 10: cupcakes

so I've had to take a break from working on the kitchen for a few nights to do proper paid freelance work whilst the little ladies slumber. but just because I can't work on the kitchen doesn't mean I can't work in the kitchen. yesterday ava busted into the box where we're temporarily keeping all the contents of the baking ingredients cupboard. after lining up all of the little tiny bottles of extracts and food colourings and proclaiming proudly 'booze!' (props to chris for that particular language lesson) she found the polka dot cupcake liners and started chanting 'cake, cake, cake, cake!' the girl can't help it, it's in her genes.

so we gathered a few simple things and made some quick cupcakes. it took a while for ava to clock that you spoon the batter into the papers and not into your mouth or onto the floor, but her aim got better with every passing chocolate chip. I've posted this recipe in other places before and it's based on ye olde 'wacky cake' recipe that gazillions of people have been using since forever, but in case you haven't come across it and you're needing a quick one-bowl recipe that doesn't require an electric mixer, here's how it's done. if you're vegan or, like me, not vegan but never seem to have eggs in da house, this one's for you!

preheat your oven to 175C/350F and mix the following together with a spoon:
3 cups flour
2 cups sugar
2/3 cup dark cocoa powder
2 teaspoons baking soda

then use the handle of the spoon to make 3 wells in the dry mixture and pour this combo into the holes:
1/2 cup oil
2 teaspoons vanilla
2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar

then pour 2 cups of cold water and a gigantic bag of dark chocolate chips over the whole shebang and mix with a fork until smooth. put some muffin papers in a muffin tin (grease the tin if you're going paper-free but they're less likely to fall apart if you use muffin papers), fill 3/4 full and bake away for 20-25 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.

they're fab without icing but if you fancy a bit of tasty colour on top, use a hand mixer to blend together:
3 cups sifted icing/confectioners sugar
2 tablespoons butter or soy spread
approx 2 tablespoons milk or soy milk
food colouring

icing too thick? add more sugar. icing too thin? add more milk. spread it on your cooled cupcakes, throw on some sugar sprinkles or m&m's or choc chips or hundreds+thousands or anything else you fancy and chow down!

just a trim

the trim has now been attached! fresh from sanding the edges of all the lengths, I donned my trusty revolver of no more nails ultra firm fast supergripping foreversticking glue and attached them all to the cupboard doors, using the aforementioned flatter strips to cover the edges with jutting-out oak bits. at first I clamped them in place but then I quickly figured out there was no real need unless the wood was a bit bent. that no more nails stuff isn't full of toxic chemicals for nothing, it's thick and sets after about five minutes. I still need to fill in my haphazard joins with filler and also the holes in the side left by the oak strip ridge before painting.

I knew before I started these framing shenanigans that there would be casualties - even with hidden inside hinges that are a wee bit adjustable, two of the doors that open the same way as their buddies to the left would no longer open with wood trim attached. so the middle doors had to go and I will keep these as open cupboards, which I had been thinking of doing anyway to keep stacky bowls and the spice brigade close at hand, so no bigola. once I paint those fugly brown cabinet frames and add some wood trim, you won't even miss them.



here's the whole shebang kitted out in new trim. those drawers aren't crooked in real life when they're properly closed, I've just left them all open in different amounts so they don't touch while the glue is drying!

next up - primer and paint. I've gone for a crown low-vapour kitchen cabinet paint that is the apparent enemy of grease and steam, in a room-brightening shade that is the apparent enemy of terra cotta. it's called 'milk white'. the 'pure brilliant white' was just a little too much for me to take on, way too much pressure to maintain, way too cheery for a non-morning person such as myself. what ho, if I can tear myself away from this late-nite jeeves & wooster repeat I might get a coat done tonight. but probably not, it's already late. fingers crossed ava and lulu sack out simultaneously tomorrow for a good long afternoon nap.