Furoshiki!

Good Afternoon all,

I'd like to share with you my latest obsession:  The Japanese art of Furoshiki, or cloth folding.  This is usually used to wrap gifts or carry things such as books or even watermelons!

I've been using a (homemade) furoshiki wrap for my lunch this week, and I think it's super cute!  I made the furoshiki wrap by cutting up a square of fabric (that I made from the same fabric as my ironing board cover) and hemmed a simple edge onto it.  Then the fun started...

 Lay the cloth out in a diamond in front of you...

Pop your lunch in the centre of the cloth- I use a small clippy box for fruit and a medium clippy box for soup or leftovers or whatever.  There's usually a banana or a cereal bar balanced in there too...

 Take the left and right corners and bring them up over the lunch and tie in a double knot...

 Turn the whole thing round so the loose sides are on the left and right again and bring these up, a bit like wrapping a present.

 Both sides up...

 ...And tied in a double knot.  I tend to do this quite loosely, and not tie the knot too close to the lunch inside, so it acts like a carrying handle.

You can even slip your chopsticks through the 'under-knot'.  I really like the way this looks, and the way it holds your lunch together, especially if you're like me and end up with all sorts of random or loose items in your lunch!  The good thing about this is that it doesn't matter if your lunch is an awkward shape either, because you're not forcing your food into a square box! :)

Mini Apple and Blackberry Pie

Good Afternoon all,

As progress with the house has slowed a little, please indulge my frequent posts about baking. I've just bought two tiny, super cute pie dishes from Cargo Homestores, via Amazon. They arrived on Wednesday and I was amazingly keen to make a cute dessert for the Mr. Cue rummaging through the fruit bowl and freezer...In the end I used an apple and some blackberries that I picked and froze from our trip to Manor Farm Country Park. I also decided to try a lattice crust, which I've never really done before, and I think it worked rather well.

And here is a pic of the pie once baked and crispy...

To give some idea of size and scale of the cute mini pie dishes, here is how big they really are!

The pastry was ready roll shortcrust pastry (I know, I'm lazy) and the filling was made using one apple (I think it was a golden delicious or something, just what I had in the fruit bowl) peeled and cut into chunks. I popped this in a bowl with about a tablespoon of caster sugar and a teaspoon of cinnamon and microwaved on high for 2 and a half minutes. Then I added in a handful of frozen rasberries and drained off the syrupy liquid. I lined the dish with pastry and filled it with the fruit. I cut the rest of the pastry into strips and put a lattice on top, brushing the edge with milk to make sure it stuck. Then I trimmed the edges, brushed the top with more milk and sprinkled a little lot more sugar and cinnamon on top.

Bake at about 180C for 15 to 20 minutes (perhaps longer if you're making more than one) then EAT!

Finally Finished Bedroom

Good Afternoon.

It's a Bank Holiday Weekend here in Blighty, and according to some ancient law, one MUST do some kind of DIY.  We chose to paint, and finish the much neglected bedroom.  We'd fallen into a trap with the bedroom-the 'no-one will see it but us' trap which meant that other, more public rooms got all the attention, whilst we woke up every morning in a white, bland, hand-me-down furniture and uni house bed kinda way.  Cue obligatory before shot.  Note the dark gray wall (Which I liked for ages, BTW), the country pine bedsides and the bubble glass lamps.  Nice.

So, you saw what we did with our bed, which was to build up the headboard and upholster the whole thing in lovely grey felted wool.  That was a good start.  Then we picked up some really nice bedside tables (Actually they were 'coffee tables' but I don't think anyone minds...).  We also found some old Anglepoise model 90 lamps.  We couldn't find matching ones, so I have a white one and the Mr has the black one.  One day we might buy another one so that they match, but these were free :-).

The Bank Holiday Weekend Paintjob saw us covering over that dark grey wall (and indeed all of the other walls) with Dulux Once in Chic Shadow.  Yes.  This is the same colour as the living room.  I think it's my favorite paint colour now.  The door frames now look nicer, the baseboards look nicer, hell even our furniture looks nicer.  We even managed to put up and old mirror that we got in a charity shop for £3.00.  It  always looked awful against the white, but somehow it just works against the grey.

OK, OK...Here's a pic of the AWFUL chevrons I painted in the wardrobe.  We're going to sand them down, paint over in grey and start again.  Any ideas how I can get them neater?

All in all, the bedroom is so much calmer now.  It was much nicer to wake up this morning :-).  Eventually I's like to swap out the Eames (It's actually one of the dining chairs and needs to go back...) for a Bertoilla Diamond Chair (or something similar...), with a yellow chevron cushion perched on top.  Sigh.

There is no rest for the wicked though, as tomorrow we're planning to paint the hall starts and landing (An onerous task as we have a wall nearly 5 meters tall) in a gorgeous shade of olive green-grey.

Bored of the Ironing Board...

Good Evening.

Straight to the point.  My ironing board has seen better days.  We bought it when we moved into our first place a couple of years ago, and it was the cheapest in the Argos catalogue.  Oh how times change :-D

The shameful shot:

So, rather that splurge on a whole new board I've been on the hunt for the perfect cover.  Never going to happen.  I certainly didn't find a Brabantia jobbie that would do the trick, and some of the nicer ones would be too big due to the board being so cheap.  The next logical step was to have a peek at Etsy but by the time you add shipping to the UK things get a bit steep.  My budget was ideally around £15, so I decided I''d have a crack at making my own.
I headed to John Lewis, and picked 2 meters of beautiful Tanya Whelan fabric, which was half price and some 4oz flame retardant wadding.  Armed with tutorials I found on Pinterest (Oh dear, I think I'm addicted), I set to work...

Materials ready to go (That tubby chap is my pincushion ^_^)

The Board with the old cover removed and set fire to...

I sort of skipped a step here.  There are two layers of wadding in there, cut the exact size of the board top.  The fabric is good side down, then cut the same shape as the board but with a 4-5in border.

Then I pinned a wide hem around the outside with string in the channel, so I can use this as a drawstring to tighten the cover on the board later.

At the end I left a little gap for the string to hang out so that it can be tied up.  I had planned to tie ribbon to the string a little further down, but the knot that was created was HUGE and made a huge lump in the channel.  I seriously thought that the knot would stop the string from moving in the channel, and thus stop the drawstring action from working.  I had at it with my sewing machine, and removed the pins...

Oooooh...

 Voila!  One shiny new ironing board cover!

Even though I didn't use ribbon in the drawstring, I wanted a cute little tie off, anyway.  Right then, glam, creative bits over-I now have to do the actual ironing.  Sad face.

Cute New Outfits

Good afternoon, whilst the next post is not about the house, it IS about feeling pretty (and the house is in the background, after all).  I've been watching a fair bit of Pushing Daisies lately, and am utterly besotted with the wardrobe of Charlotte Charles, AKA Chuck.  Losing a bit of chunk has given me the opportunity to choose new clothes and styles and I'm relishing it!  I put together an outfit in theory, seeing how it would look together.  This is the result:

Happy with the way it looked, I decided to rock it for real this morning.  I'm going for 'Librarian Chic' here, and I think I pulled it off...

The exact pieces aren't identical, but I like seeing it all down together first.  Perhaps I will start keeping photos of all my clothes so that I don't have to go hunting through the wardrobe trying on hundreds of combinations to see if I like something together.  Hmm, I feel a project coming on!

A Few Changes...

There have been a few changes to the blog, and there are probably some more to come.  I've had a few changes myself-so if you'll forgive the self-indulgent nature of this post, I'll fill you in.  I've decided to finally lose my extra weight.  I was about two and a half stone overweight, and I've just about lost the first stone.  Yay me.  I've finally started to feel 'pretty' again, and I've wanted to reflect this in my house, my clothes...everything.  Hence the changes.  I've started to re-decorate some of the house, and I'm super excited to share that with you!
I'm going to find the pictures from the original Estate Agency listing for our house, because even though it's a rental and we've not been able to change anything structurally, it was still a bland white box when we moved in.  I've also been baking more and making cute bento-style lunches for myself and the Mr, so perhaps a few of those will pop up.  Who knows?
Also, I've just ordered a new camera, so no more iPhone pictures!

I've just finished the bathroom.  I painted it whisper pink, and bought a cute print from keep calm gallery that reminds me to look lovely.

I love fresh starts, and I'm starting to feel like a bit of a different person.  I've even turned into a MORNING person, which I have never been in all of my 25 years.  I like this period of change, it's exciting and I wonder where I'll end up?  Hopefully it will be somewhere spectacular and you'll all be there to share it with me!