Rubbish to Riches: My Bedroom Mirror

My in-laws are moving/downsizing and as hubby has been away from home a lot this summer on research trips/conferences for his degree, I've spent a lot of time with them clearing out the cupboards. I've 'inherited' some brilliant stuff (a full china tea set and espresso set, a cake stand, a bunch of books and movies) and I've spent a lot of time helping them get rid of junk. Junk means trips to the tip (that's the garbage/recycling center for you Americans out there). And a couple weeks ago I went with my father in law to the tip to get rid of some junk from the shed in the garden.

The before shot. I got a bit excited about painting
and forgot to take a picture of it before I started.

Now the tip where my in-laws go has a little shed for unloved items that might still be useful, let's call it the 'one man's trash is another man's treasure' shed. And there, amongst worn picture frames, sofa's from the 60's and a couple retro looking sideboards, I found this mirror. Now we've needed a large mirror in our house for a while, I've not been able to see a full outfit on myself for almost a year now; we left the full length we used to have in Lancaster, I did a really good job putting it on the wall and decided that getting it off again was not worth the £10 it had cost me at Ikea. Anyway, no mirror means some dodgy outfits and also no way of seeing if I look fat or not. Result, lots of chubby pictures of myself floating around Facebook.

So this mirror came into my life, I saw it, I recalled my need for a large mirror in our bedroom, I realised that I had forgotten to bring my wallet (who brings a wallet to the tip right?). I consulted my Father-in-law and asked if he could spot me a couple quid for this mirror, he checked his wallet, £1.50 and a handful of euros (he'd just gotten back from a trip to France). We went in search of the tip man to do some haggling, he said he wanted £3 for it, we said we only had £1.50, but we had a bunch of Euros. We offered him 6 euros for it, and somehow, magically, he agreed! The mirror was mine!

Finished mirror, hung up in the bedroom.

Now what do do about the hideous purple colour (which it became clear was also not the original colour, it appears to have at one time been faux oak or beech, but may have at some point been painted a goldenrod colour and originally may have been metallic, I really don't know, I didn't dig that deep. I didn't have a ton of cash to spend on this thing, I was sort of in trouble for getting it in the first place. But last weekend my husband very kindly agreed to drop into the hardware store so I could purchase some paint and a brush to carry out my mirror makeover. I decided on a paint sample in the teal colour that we seem to like so much at our house. This cost me a whopping £1.10! I originally had opted for spray paint, but man that stuff is expensive! And I bought a paintbrush for around £3.50. That and the current exchange rate on Euros means the whole thing came in at under £10!

I got home, dismantled the frame from the mirror and took it outside. It took two coats of the paint to cover over the purple, but as it's a heatwave in England right now, it dried in under and hour. While the paint was drying I gave the mirror a good clean, removed the remnants of dried on purple paint (whoever had DIY'd it previously hadn't bothered to remove the mirror from the frame first), and gave it a good wipe down with window cleaner. reassembled the frame, moved the brackets around on the back so i could hang it vertically, and with a nail in the wall voilà!  Fantastic mirror for less than a tenner that looks like £50. Just goes to show, you never know what you can find at the tip... or something like that.

Mince Pie Madness

I know, the holidays are well and truly over, so call me crazy for sharing all my holiday stuff now. But i have some time on my hands today and I starting going through our cameras and importing all our pictures from the past couple of months and discovered a lot of forgotten photos that I had taken with the intention of writing a post and amidst the bustle of the holidays I didn't get around to it. So I was going to do a post today about ideas for keeping warm in the coldest months, but I'm going to put that one on hold and share some of the fun I got up to over Christmas instead.
In the months leading up to Christmas, one of our favourite weekly programs is The Great British Bake Off. It always gets me and hubby wishing that we could bake something, and with Christmas approaching we saw our chance to have our of bake off at home. We decided that we wanted to make our own mince pies, but we couldn't agree on a recipe, so in order to avoid an argument and have a little fun, we decided to have a competition to see who could make the best mince pies. We chose our recipes in secret and purchased our ingredients (and a bun tin) and set to it. I chose a Mary Berry recipe (I figured she's the baking queen, so it would be a sure advantage. Tom chose a recipe with rum in it, because he likes rum and any food with rum in it must be better for it in his view. We set to work, albeit in our chosen forms of sleepwear ( I promise he's got boxers on under that apron). The results were probably not Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood standard, but both were tasty (mine were best in a totally unbiased taste test conducted by myself) and we ate them so fast that no one else got to try any. Mostly though it was just a good messy bit of holiday fun. I think we may make it a holiday tradition and do it every year.

Another holiday baking tradition that I have carried on from my family back in the states is making Christmas Bread. My mom makes this every year and we have it for breakfast on Christmas morning. I come from a family of six, so a large loaf is required to see us all through till dinnertime, so this thing is huge. It's an enriched  sweetbread made with eggs, milk and sugar with aniseed mixed in for flavouring, a Greek recipe in origin I believe (thus the cross at the top). I can't ever get it to rise quite right, but this year was my best attempt so far, i managed to get it cooked evenly all the way through and it sure was tasty.
On the crafting front I didn't do much this year, we were so busy in the build up that I just didn't manage to get around to it. But I will share one of my favourite crafted items that I dig out of the Christmas box every year. My grandma knits, it's something she's done as far back as I can remember, I don't know what it is she knitted most of the time, but she'd sit down and watch tennis or wheel of fortune and get out her needles and click away. Now whenever there is a new addition to the family (be it by birth or marriage) she knits them a Christmas stocking, complete with their name on it so they don't get mixed up. Grandma and grandpa have them, my parents have them along with all my aunts and uncles, cousins, siblings and now my husband has one too. This was the first year that we actually had a fireplace to hang them on. I think they are one of my favourite decorations because they're not just a decoration, they're a bit of my family that I will always have, even when I don't get to spend time with them over the holidays.
We have a handful of other Christmas traditions, but as we do them every year, I think I'll save those for another Christmas post in the years to come.

New Beginnings Part 1: Downstairs

Hi all. My little sister reminded me the other day that I had been decidedly quite on the blog for the past couple months. I'm not dead, I promise. We just moved, so I've had a lot going on.

That's right, we have left behind the lovely Lancaster for the much busier Sheffield. Tom has started his PhD in Volcanology at the University of Sheffield and I am once again playing the housewife while I wait for a visa application to (hopefully) turn into a visa so I can find a job. But in the meantime I'm keeping busy with our new house. Given the post move budget (which has been very tight) I have more ideas then actual projects, but I have been getting up to a couple things, so more posts in the near future. But today I thought I'd just reach out for some help and inspiration and share a bit of the new home with you. This will probably be a three part series, we have a lot more space inside and out. But the downstairs is the part we spend the most time in (at least in the coming winter months) and it's the first two rooms I want to tackle (as well as the ones that are giving me the most trouble).

I'll start with the lounge, and curtains. this is the bane of my current existence. I have searched high and low for some contemporary and stylish curtains to cover the three windows in our lounge (and replace those hideous blue ones), but to no avail. I have scoured several of the Sheffied fabric shops looking for fabric to make my own curtains or roman blinds and I've come up trumps every time. I'm still trying to decide what I really want I guess, I thought about doing some roman blinds with a fun print, but then I thought maybe I should do regular curtains because they're easier to make. I considered a combination of the two. I know I want to add some colour to our drab grey lounge, but I'm not looking for a boring solid, but a print might be too busy with an entire wall essentially windows. Really what I want is a nice think stripe. I've found some inspiration online recently for some DIY thick stripe curtains that I like, and I might actually be able to afford, now just to decide which colour I want and find some sheets to fit the bill.

I like these stripes.

Lounge colour scheme?

I really like the pattern on these and I found a great DIY tutorial online at Craft Interrupted. She outlines four ways she found to achieve this look, but I think I'd go with her choice and buy a couple sheets and piece it all together myself. Still a bit iffy about colour choice, I have some thoughts on using Scandinavian themed colours in the lounge, keeps it simple yet bright. I like the mix of lime, teal and blue (we have a bit of that going on already) and the dash of orange to brighten it all up a bit. We have shades of grey instead of brown in the lounge, but I think it might still work. I'm considering cream and orange stripes. Either way a trip to Wilkinson's for cheap sheets is in order. A lot of sewing ahead for me.

My other challenge in the lounge lies on the opposite wall, that big blank one on the left. I want to do a really great montage of photos and things on the wall, I have three collage style frames already, but I think they may look a bit sad all on their own. But I must get something up there, so it's that or nothing at the moment. I also have the mantle to do something with. I find this one a bit daunting because the mantelpiece is firstly so low, secondly so narrow, and thirdly I have that beast of a 1960's gas fire to contend with! As Christmas is coming I'm waiting to tackle this project for a couple more weeks, then I can do a Christmas display and hopefully inspiration for after the holidays will come to me. I think more to come on this in future Christmas related posts.

Something like this only hung horizontally.

Finally we have the kitchen, which is much bigger then our last house, we even have room for a table this time (which we don't use a great deal, but it's there). We have one big bare wall in the kitchen as well, which doesn't bother me as much as the lounge because there's a lot less empty space in there. In fact I'm almost worried about hanging anything on this wall because I'm afraid it might give the kitchen a cluttered feel. So i think whatever goes here will have to be very simple. I've thought about perhaps finding some printables or images of herbs or veggies from an old book and framing them simply. But I think by far my favourite idea is to find an old window frame and hang it. Now I don't think I would put photos behind, it would make the room too busy, but I like the idea of a mirror, or perhaps a subtly textured print of fabric or paper in a contrasting colour to the wall. But I don't have a friendly neighborhood salvage yard, so where I might find some of these gems is a question I have yet to answer.
That's it for part one I'm afraid. But there is much much more to come. I love crafting during the holidays, and I have several projects under way for Christmas as well as some fun stuff by way of baking to post about this week. So it's going to get busier around here!

Gooseberry Goodness

Gooseberries in my jam making pot.

   I had a surprise yesterday. Our neighbors across the road seem to have adopted us, their kids are all in their late 30's and from what we've heard, not particularly the kind of grown children one is entirely proud of. Anyway, they often chat with us when we bump into them and seem to have taken us under their wing. They have an allotment and occasionally we get their 'allotment leftovers' (the extra stuff they don't want or need). On Tuesday it was a bag full of potatoes, cabbage and rhubarb. But then I got a knock on the door yesterday  and received a bag full of gooseberries.
   I have never eaten a gooseberry before, or any product containing gooseberries. My only experience with gooseberries at all is that they are the only berry that none of my Viva Pinata animals will eat and can't be turned into anything useful by Bart. (Sorry if no one knows what Viva Pinata is, but it's a fun and slightly addictive video game for kids that I really shouldn't like, but I do.) Anywho, out came my trusty jam cookbook, I was pretty sure there was a recipe in there for gooseberries... and sure enough I found it. Although I was a bit disappointed to discover that here too the dear gooseberry had been rather neglected, only got two pages and one recipe, the intro section took up more space then the actual recipe itself. But I set to work and made a small batch. I think I probably got about a pint of jam out of two pounds of gooseberries. I again cut back on the sugar, I think the recipes in the book add too much generally and too much sugar stifles the fruit flavors and since I've never had gooseberry anything I thought I'd like to know what they actually taste like.

Gooseberry Jam.

   I was hoping the finished jam would retain the bright green color of the berries, but sadly it went a bit brownish orange. This could mean I scorched the sugar a bit, so if more of these green gems land in my lap I might try warming the sugar first. I also left the seeds in, the recipe recommended that I strain them out with a food mill, but I don't have a food mill and trying to strain all the pulp through my little plastic sieve wasn't happening. The seeds are really small and seem tender enough so I just left them. Plus they make it look nice in the jars.
   The finished product is nice, not really like anything I've ever had before. Now that I've used them for jam I'm wondering what else gooseberries are good for. I know you can eat them raw but they're a bit sour/bitter so I'm not sure about that. i thought about mixing some in with my next batch of Pims or white wine sangria. If anyone out there has any ideas about how else to use gooseberries please comment and let me know!

Mug Shots

I don't know what the weather has been like wherever you people are, but here in Lancaster it has been horrible. Rain rain rain and yes... more rain. Combined with the inevitable decline of summer television programmes, this is proving fatal for me and my husband. Normally this time of year we get out in the evenings and play a bit of frisbee or tennis or bowls, go for a walk somewhere or just sit in the garden and read for a while. But with all the wet weather I can safely say that neither of us will be suffering from tennis elbow anytime soon. Needless to say we're running short of fun, cheap indoor activities to fill our evenings with.

I recently discovered Pinterest. Yes, I realise I'm about a year and some odd month behind the curve on this one, but I've caught up now and it's like finding a whole new secret part of your house you didn't know about for years... or something on par with that feeling. I have a list of DIY home decor about three pages long, about 15 new hairstyles to try, and half a dozen recipes to attempt. I also found this super fun way of making (cheap) personalized mugs (and plates, bowls, saucers, whatever else you like). So yesterday I ran around town between showers and picked up some supplies (which was really the hardest part of this project, and we set to work on our personalized mugs after dinner.

 So all I needed for this project were plain white porcelain mugs. I got mine for 1.50 each at Sainsbury's because the pound shop and Wilkinson's both let me down, but these will probably hold up better anyway. And some sharpies, I got mine for half price at Ryman's, which was awesome! Altogether I spent under ten pounds for everything. If you happen to already have  sharpies at home well then lucky you.


So basically it was easy, we spent about an hour drawing all over our mugs. I outlined mine in pencil first, because I'm a bit of a perfectionist that way. If 
we messed up a bit we used some nail polish remover and a bit of cotton ball to wipe it off and start over. I just wrote on mine with funky letters, Tom got a bit more creative and put a volcano (surprise surprise) and his token spider on his. Once we finished we popped them into the oven for half an hour at 180 C. When they finished we left them to cool completely and then used them for a cup of tea.

I did find that some of the colors faded/ morphed into different colors in the oven, I couldn't tell you why this happened, but it did. Most of the colors were fine, but the lime green sort of went a browner color and Tom used a bit of yellow which faded and the light blue and teal both came out the same teal shade. Also, the teal ink on my mug seems to be rubbing off a bit, but the other colors are fine, so i might just reapply and rebake. I haven't washed them yet, so I don't know how they'll hold up. But Pinterest posters assure me that it's permanent but hand wash only. If it washes off then we just get another night of fun doing it again!

Anniversary Memories

    I seem to forget I have this blog, and then I remember and my day gets more exciting. I would love to report that the local pick-your-own here in Lancaster has opened, but sadly the weather seems to be interfering with the strawberry's ability to ripen... or indeed survive at all. So no jams, jellies or preserves as of yet, but my small jar of Marmalade based income seems to be growing, the office types where my husband works are loving the stuff. So as long as I continue to ignore the fact that I have enough saved up for a new blouse, I shall have plenty to church out some strawberry jam as soon as the farm opens for business.

The header to our seating chart.

    But for now I have some other plans. In one week from today my husband and I will celebrate our first anniversary, which I find very exciting and rather unbelievable, time flies when you're having fun or so they say. Anyway, I found myself looking through some of our wedding photos today and remembering all the find I had DIYing for our wedding, realised that I hadn't posted any of it yet and thought I'd better get on it pronto. I might plug a couple of the local small businesses we used too, apologies, but they were so good to us and did amazing work! Most of the photos are from my dear friend and fantastic wedding photographer, Liz Kenny, so if you're impressed and want her details let me know!

My hand beaded veil.

    The very first project I did myself after we got engaged was my veil. I had gone with my mom and sisters to buy my dress while I was back home in the states for a few months (courtesy of UK immigration services) and had been pleasantly surprised by the cost of my dress but shocked at the prices they listed for accessories. A simple, single tier veil with a beaded hem was in the region of $100! Being on a tight budget I thought, "well I'll just not wear a veil then", but my mom and a couple friends talked me around and I started to consider it. I took a trip to the craft store to find some supplies for my next DIY project and came across a simple plain single tier veil for $5. It needed some sprucing up so I visited a fantastic bead store in Highlands Ranch Town Center, Beadniks, which may not be there anymore, but what a fantastic store! I explained to the lady on staff what I was doing and she helped me find everything I needed, beads, a special thin and flexable needle and even the right thread to use. It took me a whole weekend of Dr. Who episodes on Netflix, but the result was fantastic and meant alot more because I'd done it myself, plus it only cost about $20.

Our invitations.

    My next project while I was USA bound was the wedding stationary. I didn't have a huge budget to order personalised invitations, and none of the DIY kits at the craft store felt right for me. So I embarked on a mission to make my own. Now having done this, if I were to do it again, I wouldn't. It took ages and although I was happy with the result, it wasn't worth the time or the money, the DIY kits worked out cheaper and would have been much less of a headache to put together. Granted I did pick a challenging design. But I had fun doing it at the time and being creative. I did a pocket envelope out of thick ply card, lined with scrapbooking paper and printed everything using Microsoft Word. I ordered the envelopes online. The save the dates were really cute, but I don't have a picture of them right now, can't remember what I did with my wedding scapbook.

   

    Back in the UK I really got going, with under a year left and a lot to get done my creative self was under pressure. I had seen a friend's take on a wedding guestbook while I'd been back in Colorado (thanks Karmen!) and loved the idea of doing a photo frame (or two) to hang up and see all the time instead of a guestbook that would get tucked away somewhere and rarely seen. So I picked up some tagboard and pens from Hobbeycraft and cut them to the size of the frames we wanted, found a couple of our engagement photos that we both liked and used some double sided tape to stick them on. Great because I can swap out the pictures for wedding photos (if I ever get around to it).

    By this point we'd chosen our reception venue, The Cross Barn, and I was trying to come up with simple and efective ways of decorating the walls given the restrictions on budget and that the venue had for hanging things from the walls and ceilings. I decided to make some bunting, it matched my DIY, English summer theme and would be easy to get up there on the day without spoiling the effect of the Barn's interior. I was short a sowing machine so I did it all by hand, which was a bit of a challenge. I think it turned out great and loads of people mentioned how understated and nice it was.
    I also did our seating chart myself, the photo at the top is of the header. I had a lot of leftover odds and ends from making the stationary and decided I'd rig up a seating chart with it. I cut out little name tags for each guest and strung them on leftover ribbon, then attached the ribbons to a large piece of tagboard under the table number. We had banquet seating at long tables. I made the table number cards for the tables using tagboard, a home-made stencil and sponge painting. Tom's mum wrote all the place cards by hand for us, just plain craft store bought place cards in white. And we glued the little blue bows (another Hobbycraft purchase) onto them afterwards.

Place cards handmade by Tom's mum.

    I think perhaps my best stroke of genious was to make my own favours. I struggled a long time with what to do to match the theme, create something that people would actually remember and appreciate, and not spend a small fortune. I had considerd buying small pots of local honey or jam, but I discovered this was easier said then done. My mom then suggested that I make my own, which was a brilliant idea and I felt silly for not thinking of it before. So I ordered my little jars from Jam Jar Shop and looked up recipes. I made Strawberry, Raspberry, Peach and Marmalade. I bought some scrap fabric and ribbon form my local fabric store and made little toppers. the tags came from WHSmith and I hand wrote them myself. The jams were by far my greatest DIY success, and I have had some many compliments about both the idea and the jam. It was one of the reasons I decided to start blogging about my jam making in the first place. Although as it turns out there's not been a lot of jam making going on recently.

 I did most of the table decorations myself, with the help of friends and family. I bought the candle lanterns from Ikea and filled the bases with ivy cut around my in-laws home in Hampshire. The table runner was from Hobbycraft. The flowers I did myself with the help of my sister, I bought bunches of cheap flowers from the supermarket and simply cut them to length and arranged them in pasta jars I had saved and cleaned out over the course of a few months. Simple, inexpensive and really suited the theme and style whereas flourist centrepieces would have felt too formal and stuffy.
    Finally I have to give some lip service to the fantastic crafty tradespeople we did use, because they did such a fantastic job and it all came out exactly as I had pictured it in my head all along. My beautiful bouquet and my sister's posies were created by Charlotte and her team at Moutan in Hartley Wintney. I was so pleased with how it came out, exactly as I'd pictured it, and I don't know how they did it with as little information as they got from me, but it was perfect!
And another special thanks goes out to Lesley at Bespoke Bakery, our cake was not only beautiful, but also very very yummy. We had half a dozen guests at our wedding with gluten allergies and she did the entire cake gluten free for us and most people didn't have a clue.
    If you are planning a wedding and want any advice on any of these projects or any other DIY wedding ideas, please contact me. I had such a great time doing all this stuff and would love to share some of my knowledge with you!

Sour-dough Starter: A Lesson in Patience.

   Hello again, I'm back. There hasn't been a lot going on recently, by which I really mean there's been a lot going on but I haven't actually finished any of it yet so I don't feel that I can post it. But I do have one or two things to contribute today. I was cleaning off my camera's memory card in preparation for the weekend (Tom has the weekend off and we're going to have adventures in Northwest Yorkshire) and I discovered a few photos I'd taken a while back with the intention of posting, but I never got around to it at the time and they were forgotten. Anyway, they're of my sour-dough starter that I attempted about a month ago and the resulting loaf of bread I made which has since been consumed.
   I've never attempted sour-dough before, this was my first go at it, but I remember my mom making it when I was young. We've watched The Hairy Bikers Bakeation over the past several months, Tom doesn't mind cookery programmes as long as they're a bit manly, and we've been inspired to try several of their recipes. They visited a sour-dough bakery at one point in the programme and it looked so yummy. Tom has never tried sour-dough before, in fact it's very hard to find here in the UK, probably because it's seen as a French thing and therefore unacceptable. But I grew up in Seattle with Ivars clam chowder in a sour-dough bowl, only the best lunch ever! But I had no idea how to make a starter and somewhere in my mind baking bread has always been filed under the 'extremely difficult, do not attempt' section. But within a week River Cottage did a feature episode on bread baking and to my surprise sour-dough was included with a step by step guide to making your own starter. It was the universe telling me it was time to give it a go.

My starter starting to bubble.

  Still apprehensive (I've never baked bread that's turned out right) I sought out some help on the internet, such a wonderful place. I stumbled on sourdoughhome.com and probably got more help and advice then I needed. In fact some of the advice put me off trying my starter from scratch, but I ignored it and went ahead. Just whole wheat flour and water. I got my flour from the back of my cupboard, my in-laws had picked me up some stone mill ground flour from a National Trust site in Surrey last summer and I hadn't known what to do with it, we don't really eat a lot of whole wheat anything around here and you can't really use it in cookies or Yorkshire puds, so this seemed like a perfect excuse to dig it out. The water was from my kitchen tap, just mixed into the flour until a slimy gloop formed. I covered it and put it on my kitchen windowsill where it would be warmed by the sun. Every day I scooped out about half of it, and fed it with a bit more flour and water and within a few days it began to show signs of life, little bubbles. By day 10 it was rising and doubling in size and I decided it was time to try some bread. Now, I'm not a very patient person, when I start a baking project I like it to be finished right away so I can eat it, I have a hard time waiting for cookies to come out of the oven, usually I eat more dough then actually gets baked, so waiting a week and a half on this starter to liven up was a huge test for me. but I made it all the way to day 10, yay!
   Now this is where I tend to go wrong with bread, and this time was no different. I added a bit of the starter to more flour (I used strong white bread flour this time so we'd get white bread instead of whole wheat) and kneaded it tirelessly for 20 minutes or so then formed it into round loaf shapes and left it to rise overnight. When I came down in the morning, instead of rising upwards it had risen outwards into a giant puddle of dough. It was bubbly inside, but wouldn't hold it's shape. So I tried again, kneading it back, adding a tough more flour and shaped half of it into a round and dusted it well with flour, hoping that would help it hold it's shape, and put the other half into a loaf tin. I baked the round after only a couple hours and it turned out alright. The loaf tin dough rose to the top of the tin quickly and I baked that straight after.

  My resulting bread was a bit heavy, this seems to be my biggest problem, maybe I don't bake it quite long enough, but it was sour-dough tasty and my husband loved it, so both loaves were gone within a couple days. I'd definitely try this again, and the whole wheat flour worked a treat (more natural yeasty bits in there), but I might try a different starter and bread recipe and see how it turns out, there's a wealth of different tips and hints online, just do a Google search.