orange and turquoise.

the vacation was exactly what we needed, time away to recharge and reconsider and return! and return we have. the olympics get officially underway in a few hours, the city is a-buzz with lots of people and a feeling of hope, because really, isn't that what the whole thing's about? i love it. and i love that i'm here to experience it! we're catching the men's road cycling tomorrow seeing as they are coming through our neck of the woods (literally) and a kind friend has offered me a ticket along to some diving! so so excited. we'll try to catch the marathon and maybe the cycling time trial. and of course, we live in wimbledon, so there's always the crowd roaring just down the road. it gonna be great! plus some of our great friends are returning to this fair city for and we are hosting which just tickles me beyond belief. 

but in between spectating and working and hosting, we're on the diy path. our time in california was spent with dear dear friends who have the cutest little house just outside san fran. they've been in their place less time than we've been in ours, but are much more established. the whole - how to actually decorate a house has paralysed me. what if it goes wrong? i guess we repaint.

so this weekend my wonderful husband has agreed to paint the final room without any adornment. we've decided to keep with the soft grey that's been used in the bedroom and the living room, mainly because we have leftover paint, and because, well, it makes things easy and keeps the space feeling connected (or so say the decorating mags...)

i was lucky enough to snag some cool curtains from marvellous while i was home - in grey. so grey it is. with orange. we chose orange boxes some time ago for open shelving storage, they aren't going anywhere and actually, orange and grey really work. i should mention that this plan includes spray painting a ceramic statue of a horse bright orange. i inherited this from my grandmother (and have been assured it is of no value other than sentimental). and i love it. partly because she made it, and partly because well, it's going to be an orange horse. (grin)

ignore the homebase sign, it's just where we get our paint, not part of the design elements...

and turquoise, well it's predetermined. the kitchen already has bits, and apparently i'm drawn to it. i can't explain this. it just happens. it happened to marvellous also, there's shots of it throughout her house. i'm my mother's daughter. i probably say that once a week now...

so i'm framing three prints of butcher cuts (we're clearly not vegetarians, but really, i'm the grandaughter of a cattle farmer, so there's little hope for me there) in turquoise frames, and thinking of an oil cloth on the table and utilizing one of my absolutely favourite wedding gifts -a turquoise water pitcher. hopefully it will bring the the kitchen and dining room into a more cohesive space.

art on walls, cushions on chairs, drapes on windows. i know it's simple, it's just about getting. it. done.

sew-nice.

a few weeks ago le boy and i had a conversation that went like this:

him: hey babe, if we got you a new good sewing machine how long would it last? 

me: hmmm about 20 years. 

him: let's go tomorrow morning. 

and when we went to john lewis and spoke with the lovely and helpful sales lady, she informed us that yes, they do last 20 years, in fact they last longer :) i was pretty certain about what i wanted (a jonome) le boy, being the consummate value for money man, asked a lot of questions, maybe more questions than most men would ask in the sewing department, and definitely more than a man who won't ever actually touch a sewing machine should ask. but i kinda love that he did, because it means that he cares about the stuff i care about. (ok sappy portion is over). in the end we walked out with a janome, of course we paid for the privilege. 

so what else to do but put the new baby to work? 

and work she has!

wanting to dress up our bed i made a few quick throw pillows. the basic how-to for cushion covers is here with a great measurement guide for the most common sizes. 

i wanted to dress them up a bit and turned to martha for some ribbon inspiration.

for the loopy centre pillow.

and for the rosette.

i just pintucked the ruffle until i liked it and sewed straight down the centre of the ribbon.

all very easy and very very quick!

and for the thing i'm currently most proud of? the console table slip cover! an ikea expedit bookcase turned on its side and covered now provides oodles of hidden storage. the instructions and genius behind this is found from in the sept 2011 canadian house and home.

(and isn't the new chair pretty?) we're ambling our way toward finishing up the living room. in my dreams i'm sewing the curtains this weekend...

and a partridge in a pear tree.

i'm a bit behind, but here goes.

we decided to spend christmas just the two of us. we've had an enormous amount of travel this year, and with money short and limited mobility due to surgery six weeks earlier, we just wanted some time to be at home and be together. we are so glad we did! we realise that this probably won't happen very often and actually, sharing our first christmas together, just us, was such a special time.

to say this year's christmas was catagorized by food would be an understatement. we basically ate our way out of the house.

but shall we start at the beginning?

christmas morning was wonderful. we woke up and had our coffee in bed while we opened our stockings. santa was oh so good, bringing cute note cards, a 'keep calm' mug and a book i'm so glad to read - the meaning of marriage by tim keller - love it already. knew that i would!

christmas morning church is a tradition that we started last year, reasoning that with overseas family we might be frequently travelling during the period, but we'd always be able to find a local church. this year it was special to worship at our (new) home church and enjoy a church filled-to-the-brim with small children, oh so excited about christmas. we remarked that it was a fantastic way to remind ourselves of the reason for christmas - christ - and we hope to keep this tradition alive in our family!

we returned to begin the preparations for the feast and open our under-the-tree presents. it was a year of abundant blessings, our offerings were small, our hearts flung open, our bellies were FILLED.

i set to preparing the dinner that ended all dinners. and once it was all in the oven. we headed out for a walk.

prawns on a bed of winter greens with horseradish cream - i substituted prawns for scallops in the recipe, mainly because my fishmonger was all out on christmas eve, but we liked it so much it's getting a second chance at a birthday dinner in six weeks time!

king of his castle.

roast partridge, pheasant and guinea fowl - why go traditional when there's only two mouths? this was stunning and seemingly more appropriate and still an enormous amount of food!

the very best roast potatoes - use goose fat, it changes everything. and i'm not exaggerating at all.

for dessert we had lava cakes, i wasn't thrilled with them. partly they didn't end up as chocolate lava in the middle, partly the oven decided to stop working in the middle of them baking and partly we were just to filled with food to appreciate anything. lesson learned, in future, i'll go for a pre-cooked, light dessert!

the evening was topped off with watching the classic - national lampoon's christmas vacation, love it. and then suffering from a serious case of 'christmas-itis' we went for a midnight walk through our neighbourhood. it was so lovely to see houses lit up and trees in bay windows and the streets completely quiet, save our footsteps and the jingle bell on the collar of the cat that tried to follow us home.

pantry.

what to do in a kitchen with no space? we have about 5 cupboards in our teensy kitchen. and both food and dishes for cooking and eating, to store. so how to fix this?

we've put up a couple corner shelves, painted white to match the walls, and we're using glass jars.

to keep from mixing up the sugar and salt, icing sugar and flour and the different types of flour i use, i printed cute labels found on pinterest onto sticker paper (seriously, the most useful stationery item i own!). this was an inexpensive project, gets us away from using plastic to store food in and prettied up the kitchen! all with the added bonus of random food no longer falling on our heads when we open the cupboard doors!

Source: sissyprint.blogspot.com via Brie on Pinterest

i love the look, the old-time feel and the ease of it all. the kitchen is 100% more functional! which makes me one happy lady! 

glass jars from ikea, variety of sizes: £0.90 - £2.69

sticker paper: free

corner shelves (4 total) : £4/shelf

Total cost for new pantry: £30

something new.

'upcycling' is a huge trend these days. i'm sure our grandmothers would laugh if they heard about this - taking something that's no longer fit for its original purpose and giving it new life with a little creativity. part of the 'make do and mend' trend. that being said, i'm loving it. i constantly find things all over the house that can be made into something new.

most recently? old wool sweaters. i love wool - i mean i've usually got some of it tangled in my fingers and ready to keep another warm, but what happens when a sweater is past its prime? i had two sweaters that were in this condition. one sweater, the red one, is more than 30 years old. it originally belonged to marvellous, and i believe was purchased over here in the british isles (we have a long love-affair with this island in my family). i came into ownership about a decade ago and i wore that sweater to death throughout university. the moth holes and thinning elbows making it all the cooler. but now, it just looked pitiful. the second was a super cute short sleeved sweater that i accidentally shrunk in the wash...i tried to wear it a few times after that, but it was never the same. so what to do?

i felted the red sweater in a super hot wash and then dry in the dryer - this thing was half it's original size and had fuzzed up really well. i then cut off the sleeves, hemmed closed the arms and neck holes and stuffed a pillow inside. i then used an invisible stitch to close the seam. the white sweater was of course, already mainly shrunk and so i didn't feel it needed a second whirl. i followed the process a second time and had two sweaters-pillows with minimal sewing or effort. plus, i didn't have to buy any fabric or spend any time knitting to then felt it. and really, that's all folks. they are now sitting pretty in our living room, a little seating nook has been created with a footstool and a few cushions and that's a welcome relief because we are sorely short on seating at the moment!

palletting.

we've got a large open space in our living room. the room is shaped in such a way that all the furniture needs to go on the edge of the room, i know, it's a design no-no, but really we're not able to do much else. so the centre of the room needs something to fill it. i have a love of reclaimed things, (which is awkward when combined with my love for ikea) but rarely do i approve of the price tag associated with such items. so when i saw this on one of my favourite online shops i thought - i can do that...

and so began my obsession with pinterest and pallets. my pallet board is here. and i found some ideas i liked.

but how does one find a pallet?

firstly, i should say that pallets are pretty big, about nine square feet, so one wouldn't fit in our car. but when you start looking, suddenly pallets are everywhere. i've seen at least five in people's trash in the last couple of weeks. what is most fortunate is that we live down the street from a carpet warehouse (bizarre, i know, but that's london for you) and i was pretty sure if we asked nicely they'd let us have one. so i dispatched le boy one morning, and indeed, he was allowed to take his pick!

and this is what we started with.

it was in pretty good condition, considering it's former life as a warehouse storage item. but pallets are made from rough wood and have some not so nice parts (read: big splinters). i'll outline what we did but i didn't take step-by-step photos because, well, i wasn't planning on a tutorial and i'm a bad blogger and i had paint all over myself and it was cold and really we all know how to sand and paint, right?

pallet transformation:

materials needed:
wooden pallet
sandpaper (coarse and fine)
dropsheet
paint for interior wood & brushes
pre-painting wash solution
wheels

steps:

• start by wiping down pallet with wash solution, we found some handy wipes at the hardware store, but even just rag with some water and vinegar would do the trick, allow to dry 
• sand entire pallet with coarse sandpaper, this will take quite a bit of time, but is worth doing well so that you get a good finish 
• wipe down again to get rid of all the dust (very very important!) 
• paint your first coat and allow to dry. because the wood is untreated it sucks up quite a lot of paint, consequently we painted it on quite thickly - if you are going for a fully professional look it's better to do light coats and more of them, but i'm ok with (and indeed want) a slightly more rustic look, so as this gets used, i'll be happy for paint to chip etc. 
• sand with light sandpaper (this allows the second coat to bind well to the first) 
• paint second coat and allow to dry 
• attach wheels, we used castors from ikea, 2/£10, easy to attach and they have brakes so the coffee table doesn't go flying across the room! 

total cost: £35

paint & supplies - £15

castors - £20 

pallet - free! 

pretty great savings. and i LOVE LOVE LOVE it. a lot. 

i'm linking up to take it on tuesday.

twenty-nine::newlywed::homemaking

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a perfect saturday:

palletting:

& slow-cooking:

more to come on both!

twenty::newlywed::homemaking

::: to see all 31 days of posts please click here :::

i mentioned that i was changing out our curtains the other day. the old curtains were intended to match a purple wall - which is no longer purple. and really, the flowers weren't really our style anyway. i was looking for an inexpensive option (remember, we're on a budget). inspired by pinterest to go with drop cloths and yes, i'm a little behind the times, i realise this was cool about two years ago, but i didn't have a flat to decorate two years ago...

Source: theletteredcottage.net via Brie on Pinterest

i dispatched le boy to our local diy store - he's definitely making friends with the owner! and he returned with two drop cloths of 12'x12'. we've got one of those drapery hanging systems which has hooks and eyes - i wasn't really looking forward to the sewing, but determined to make this experiment work! as it turned out once i'd washed the drop cloths and looked at the whole system - that i could wiggle the hooks through the drop cloths without any sewing - a big bonus is that drop cloths are already hemmed! 

here's a before: 

and here's a few afters...taken at night (darkness is falling at about 6pm these days...)

the next afternoon le boy and i took a walk around the neighbourhood and our local park.

can i pause for a moment and just say how blessed we feel to live in our neighbourhood? there are families with children everywhere! which might seem normal for a neighbourhood with a park, except that this is london and generally children are nowhere to be seen. the park has a small pond/lake, a couple of playgrounds, a track and field area, enormous playing fields, three sets of tennis courts, a mini-putt and a fantastic running/cycle route - we LOVE it.

on the way back i asked le boy to go in ahead and draw the curtains, i wanted to ensure they looked good from the street side too! and in the process i took a few shots of our lovely house. oh how we love it!

where's le boy?

the wrought iron:

our red door:

 

and the gate: 

sixteen::newlywed::homemaking

::: to see all 31 days of posts please click here :::

 

 

the weekend's been mainly productive. i did get a little distracted by cooking - the soup from yesterday, chicken stock, delicious fish cakes that i'll post very soon! i hung curtains (more on that later), had a fight with the printer for printing everything with a blue tinge, and made some new pillow cases for our living room.

envelope pillow cases 

really these couldn't be easier, but since every tutorial i found online made these much more complicated than i believe necessary, too much cutting and hemming. i'm sure there's a purpose to all of that, but really, these are for my living room - i'm happy with just having them done at all!

you'll need a length of fabric that's an inch (or so) wider than your pillow and about 2.5 times as long. so my pillow was 15", i needed 16" wide and about 37" long. i had a couple lengths of fabric i picked up in new zealand when we were there last christmas, secretly hoping that one day, le boy and i would have our own place, in need of pillows - and here we are!

start by hemming the short edges, for a neat edge, fold 1/2", press, fold 1/2" over again, press. this contains the edge completely, and reduces the likelihood of fraying. also, as one of these edges will be visible, it's good to get everything tucked away!

now, here is where i fiddled a little bit. i had a semi-repeating, very graphic pattern, and i didn't really want it to match perfectly, so i folded my fabric so that it came 3/4 of the way over the pillow, all the way around the other side, and then the second flap came over by half again. it's nice if there's some overlap as it makes for a neat finish at the back. and remember to sew right sides facing - or your seams will be outside, and not in! (this has happened to me during late night sewing expeditions!)

you can see from my photos that i wasn't terribly fussy, i didn't even pin! i just pressed and then stitched down each side, back stitching wherever the fabric edges were for extra strength.

clip the corners for less bulk when you turn the case right side out.

stuff with a pillow. show your husband and be very excited when he makes a fuss over all the effort you went to. (don't tell him this took less than 30 min!) 

fourteen::newlywed::homemaking

::: to see all 31 days of posts please click here :::

so i was writing an email to my sister, a.b.barton, detailing my plans for saturday. le boy is helping a friend move and i have the day to myself (blissful!)

here are a list of things that i'm hoping to maybe accomplish?

envelope pillow cases for our living room - the current pillows don't seem to work well with the emerging colour scheme...

Source: freshlypickedblog.com via Brie on Pinterest

but if i'm honest, i'll be a little bit more lazy, i probably won't cut out the three separate pieces - perhaps my own 'lazy' tutorial is on the way?

stenciling the feature wall...

Source: dreamhomediy.com via Brie on Pinterest

but using a slightly different pattern.

printing off and hanging up photos on our walls from the wedding...

creating a slip cover for the plastic bin cum coffee table, which actually works really well, just looks a little ugly...

creating new drapes out of dropcloths...

Source: theletteredcottage.net via Kate on Pinterest

so it's an ambitious list - i'm also adding in grocery shopping, meal planning and a cupboard inventory - it's pantry meals this week!

Source: briebarton.blogspot.com via Brie on Pinterest

Source: briebarton.blogspot.com via Brie on Pinterest

along with a long-needed, long-distance skype date to colorado. it'll be a full day. i won't accomplish everything. but some of it will get done. and other bits will wait for later. i'm cool with that.