Craft - Driftwood sailing boat

Whenever I go to the beach, I'm always collecting shells, sea glass and bits of driftwood. They usually end up sitting in a drawer gathering dust; shells look so much prettier when they're still wet, don't they? But this weekend I decided to try making a driftwood sailing boat. I made one a few years ago and I still love it. This craft is a great use for little odds and ends of fabric.

What you'll need:

2 pieces of driftwood - one for the hull and one for the mast
1 piece of material big enough for a sail
Little fabric triangles or bells for the rigging
String/ribbon
2 pins, drawing pins, tacks or staples

Step 1. Super glue your "mast" into your driftwood boat. Mine already had a notch in it for the mast to sit in, but you could easily gouge a bit out. Prop it up in the right position and leave it to dry. It can help to put a bit of blue tack on the bottom of the boat to help it stand up.

Step 2. Press a drawing pin or a tack into each end of the boat (you might need to tap them in with a hammer). These are to keep your rigging in place. I had run out of drawing pins so I had to improvise with a dressmaker's pin at one end and a bent staple at the other.

Step 3. Prepare your sail. Measure out approximately how big your sail needs to be and cut your material to size. If you have a nice straight mast this is quite easy as you can just make a right-angled triangle. My mast was all wonky, so it took a few attempts to get it looking right.

Step 4. Hoist the sail! How you do this will probably depend on what sort of fabric you're using. My fabric, apart from being hilariously retro, was very liable to rip. I tied a piece of string around the bottom of the mast before using a needle to thread it through the bottom left corner of the sail. I sewed it along the bottom of the sail and tied the other end of the string onto the pin at the end of the boat. I then tied the top corner of the sail directly to the top of the mast, carefully pulling it taut.

However, if your fabric is a bit more sturdy you can just make a little incision in each corner and use an individual loop of string to tie each bit in place.

Step 5. Make your rigging. Tie a piece of string or ribbon from the top of the mast to the pin or staple on the opposite side to the sail. For my first boat, I decided to make little flags by cutting little triangles of contrasting fabric and attaching them to the string with a simple stitch.

This time I made use of the little bells that come on the collars of Lindt bunnies. I looped the ribbon twice through each bell to keep it in place before tying it onto the staple.

These make such pretty decorations and gifts. The big boat currently lives on top of our bathroom mirror and the little one is going to sit on the window frame. They're very light, so it's easy to blue tack them in place. Have fun making your own!

Homemade Pasta - a surprisingly easy recipe

The other day I was scanning through one of my favourite blogs, Bread & Companatico, when I came across a recipe for buckwheat orecchiette. It was around lunchtime and I was starting to get pretty hungry and these "little ears" of homemade pasta caught my eye. They were especially perfect as we had almost nothing to eat in the house except for some cupboard ingredients and a jar of passata.

I decided to give them a go. I didn't have soy or buckwheat flour so I tried them with normal plain (all-purpose) flour, but I'd love to try it with a more exciting gluten-free flour one day. I imagine this is one of those recipes which gets better every time you make it. The joy is that it's so simple.

I changed the quantities around a bit from the original recipe (which you can find here) since I was only making it for myself. However, the quantity of dough definitely makes enough pasta for two people.

Ingredients:

1 cup plain flour (or other flour of your choice)
1/4 cup lukewarm water
1/2 teaspoon marine salt
A sauce of your choice

Step 1. Combine all the ingredients in a mixing bowl to form a dough. Mine was definitely a bit watery and I had to faff around adding bits of flour later, so if it looks really sticky add in a bit more flour; you should be able to handle it without getting bits of dough all over your fingers.

Step 2. Roll into a ball, cover and leave to stand for half an hour.

Step 3. With a rolling pin or your hands, stretch it out on a floured surface until it's nice and thin. If you make the bits too thick they won't cook evenly. Chop into your desired shapes either using your fingers, a knife or scissors.

Step 4. Put a bit of salt and olive oil into a pan of boiling water. Drop in your pasta pieces and boil for around 10 mins.

Step 5. Strain and serve with your favourite sauce. In the pictures I've served it with passata and stirred through some spinach and rocket.

Enjoy! This pasta is very filling (like all fresh pasta) so you really don't need that much! Most Italian fresh pasta is made with egg, so in the future I'm definitely going to try replacing the water with egg and seeing what happens.

Thanks so much to Bread & Companatico, whose recipes I use all the time.

His'n'Her doe and stag plates - Sharpie craft

This is a craft which allows you to be really creative and is a great way of displaying your skills if you're good at drawing freehand. When it comes to drawing, I am truly terrible, but it seems even I can turn a few permanent-marker lines into a woodland scene when I put my mind to it.

What you'll need:

• A pair of plates - mine are from a cheap Ikea set, the rest of which was lost or broken at university.
• A permanent marker pen - Sharpies are great!
• Stencil (if you're using one)
• Oven pre-heated pretty much as high as it will go (mine was at 250 degrees C)

Step 1. Decided on your design. I wanted my plates to work as a pair, so I decided on a stag and doe standing on either side of a tree in a romantic moonlight meeting. Equally, you could choose an abstract design, writing (a favourite poem perhaps?) or a pretty stencil.

Step 2. Sketch out design onto the plate with a pencil. It's a bit tricky trying to drawing on a plate because they're not flat, but at least with a pencil you can rub out any mistakes!

Step 3. Draw over your pencil lines with a permanent marker. Test out the best angle on a piece of paper first. It's a bit daunting drawing with something described as "permanent", but if you do make a mistake you can scrub it off with a damp tissue whilst it's drying.

Step 4. Put your plates into your pre-heated oven and leave for half an hour. This bakes on the permanent marker, making it even more permanent. Other bloggers say they've tried scrubbing theirs off after baking and it hasn't budged. I'm not sure I'd trust them in the dishwasher, but they'd be lovely for eating cakes, starters or cheese courses!

Decorated twig tree

Just got back from a wonderful bank holiday weekend at our family house in west Wales. The sun shone, the sea was sparkling and we saw seals, a dolphin and Welsh mountain ponies up on the cliff tops. Our house over there is a time warp, filled with all sorts of old things which, placed in a cool modern context, would look vintage and trendy. In an old house accumulating the souvenirs of four generations, however, they just blend in with the rest of the well-loved stuff. Just goes to show that cool is contextual!

A lovely breakfast centrepiece

We were there for Easter, so apart from eating an obscene amount of chocolate, we also decided to make an Easter tree with branches from the garden. We always make one of these for Christmas, where we spray-paint the branches silver and decorate it with fairy lights and the silver ornaments. I think this would be a really nice thing to do for any occasion. At a party you could decorate the twigs with sweets or chocolates hanging from threads.

Step 1. Gather twigs and branches. We decided to use living branches with blossom and leaves to bring a bit of Spring into the house. Afterall, the Easter story is about new life as well as death. If you're doing this at Christmas there won't be many blooms out, so gather a few dead branches and spritz them with some spray paint.

Step 2. Put some marbles or stones into the bottom of a vase. This will keep your sprigs in their intended places. Fill the vase half-full with water (you don't need to do this is your twigs aren't alive and growing).

Step 3. Arrange your foliage. This is just like flower arranging - pick a 'front' for your Easter tree and put your branches in accordingly. We've used a backdrop of a few camellia leaves and three blossom stems (apple and ornamental cherry).

Step 4. Pour in some more marbles around your branches. These will anchor your arrangement in place.

Step 5. Decorate your branches. We used a few decorations that we found in the house - painted wooden eggs, fluffy chicks and one rather terrifying white rabbit with red eyes. We didn't have much time, but it would have been really easy to make our own decorations by painting blown eggs and sticking little feet onto yellow pompoms for the chicks.

We arranged our Easter eggs round the tree just like Christmas presents and added a bit of festive joy to our Easter celebrations. I'm definitely going to be making one for the next birthday that comes up.

Wine bottle drip candle holders

This is a clever way of getting amazing-looking candlesticks without buying anything specially!

Step 1. Drink a bottle of wine, champagne, cava, prosecco, beer... it's up to you! The only requirement is that it has a glass bottle. After you're done, give it a quick rinse out. We've left the labels on ours because we thought they were pretty, but these also look cool if you wash the label off first by soaking it in some hot soapy water.

This is a nice way to commemorate a special occasion - you could use a bottle which will remind you of a wedding, birthday or the day you moved in.

Step 2. Pop in a candle. Most candles are actually a bit wide for wine bottle openings, but if you shave a little bit off the sides with a sharp knife it should fit nicely and won't wobble about.

Step 3. Start burning! Of course, wax candles are not really supposed to drip, but if you buy slightly cheaper ones then they tend to melt a bit faster. We also helped ours out a bit by poking at the edges of the candles in order to create more impressive drips... I'd recommend putting a mat down before doing this though (as our dining table will attest to).

Try to burn candles in different shades in order to get a really colourful effect. The candles in the pictures are from Tiger: http://www.tigerstores.co.uk/tiger_home/candles_lamps_clocks/dinner_candles_90784.html

They come in all sorts of colours and you can buy 3 for £1, which is amazingly cheap, and they last a surprisingly long time as well as being good for artful dripping.

Enjoy!

Wardrobe vanity area

A surprise inside!

I'm very lucky in that my bedroom in my rented flat has a huge amount of storage space with a whole wall of wardrobes. However, it must be admitted that they're not the most beautiful things in the world and having a wall of white cupboards is not all that inspiring.

Functional but not-so-attractive wardrobes

This being a rental, there's not much I can do about them, and even if I did own the place (unlikely to happen any time soon as a similar flat was recently sold for £849,000!) fitted wardrobes are difficult to remove and expensive to replace. Plus having three shelves for my shoes is great fun.

But my wardrobes had a secret. In the middle set of doors is a little vanity area, complete with drawer, mirror and plug for my hairdryer. I saw this as the perfect opportunity to decorate scrapbook-style like I used to at university, without spoiling the clean lines of my bedroom.

Of course not everyone will have one of these neat little compartments, but I still think that decorating the insides of your wardrobe doors is a lovely way to put up some photos and add a secret pop of colour. My photos always make me smile when I get dressed in the mornings.

If you feel you can spare a couple of shelves in your wardrobe, you could always try taking one out and putting an inexpensive mirror at the back for a makeshift dressing table.

I put up a mixture of snapshots of friends and family, postcards of artworks I like and book covers by Penguin, of which I bought a big set. In one of my student rooms at university, I used these Penguin postcards to create a tiled effect around a boarded-up fireplace.

Adding your own bits and bobs, including those things you use everyday like moisturiser and perfume in nice bottles, makes it feel like a personal space just for you. 

I store my make up brushes, along with spare pens and scissors, in this ceramic shopping bag pot from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Previously I've used jam jars (Marmite jars always look cool and retro) or anything else lying around, but it's handy having everything in one place.

I love printing off photos because I have a theory that one day Facebook will explode and then I won't be able to access all the nice photos of my friends and me because they're all taken by other people. I have boxes of them, and this is a nice way to show a few of them off! 

Starting off...

Hello, welcome to my blog about all things homely (with a few extra thoughts thrown in for fun).

I'm studying for an MA in history of art and renting a flat with some friends up in Maida Vale, a really lovely little part of London. I'm going to be sharing some of my ideas for making a pretty small rented space feel like home, with crafts, diy hacks and recipes.

We love having parties and dinner parties and I have occasionally been dubbed the "Queen of Canapes" (usually by myself, but no matter). I'm always on the lookout for new recipes to make bitesize treats - after all, isn't everything so much more fun if you make it mini? 

I'm a very impatient person, so any crafts where you have to order the supplies from specialist shops or wait for things to dry overnight really aren't for me. I am a big fan of putting in a concentrated effort in order to get quick and effective results, and these are the crafts I'm going to be making a note of.

Also - despite studying art history, I'm am a very unartistic person and manual dexterity really isn't my forte, so my motto is the simpler the better!

Anna