Recipe Tin

At the end of December I was contacted by a woman who wanted a recipe box.  She’s taking part in a Secret Friend swap and as the person she’s taking care of this year is a recipe collector, she wanted something unique for her.  She’d already seen this, which she partly liked but…

…they can’t personalise anything and I think I would prefer something a little more unique, and UK based.  Do you think you could work with me on something similar but more awesome?

Of course I said I’d be delighted!  I had a bit of a think, and then remembered that back in 2011 I made this memory box.  I really enjoyed making it, but never got round to using it, so the tin has been languishing in my house feeling pretty unloved ever since.  Time to give it a new lease of life!

I stuck to a simple colour scheme of white and lilac cards, and the divider cards (Starters, Vegetables, Fish, Meat, Baking, Puddings, Condiments, Drinks and Miscellaneous) were made using pages from a vintage copy of Mrs Beeton’s Puddings & Pies, embellished with ribbon and little hand-stamped labels.  I know I’m biased, but it does look incredibly pretty – slightly vintage, slightly shabby chic, and totally unique.

For those who like to know these things, the tin measures 21.6 x 9.3 x 8.5cm (WxDxH), and the cards are 10.2 x 7.9cm (WxH).

I hope that the recipient enjoys using it, and I love the thought that she’ll be adding all her own favourite recipes to it over the years to come.

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You’ve got mail!

Or you could have, if you treat yourself to one of my new notebooks.  Some time ago a friend sent me some vintage envelopes, dated from the 1940s, which I put safely away in my desk and then forgot.

I rediscovered them last week and thought it was about time I did something with them.  I thought they were beautiful as they were, so I turned them into simple coptic-bound notebooks so as to preserve as much of the original envelopes as possible.

If you’d like to purchase one of these lovely little books then click here to visit my Etsy shop.

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Feeling a bit nostalgic?

Then treat yourself to one of these lovely notebooks, revamped using the original covers and fresh blank pages for you to fill with new memories.  Click here to visit my Etsy shop.

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Take one vintage school desk…

…and give it a bit of TLC.  That’s what I did this week.

I bought the desk at a car boot sale last Sunday, and although it’s a lovely desk there was one problem: someone had painted it black.  I’m sure they thought they were doing a good thing, and I’m sure it was very practical, but my goodness it sucked all the light out of my studio!

I attacked it with a heat gun, which got most of the paint off, then went over it with a scourer to remove as much as possible (a lot had gone into scratches in the wood).

I have to admit that I lost the will to live after a while, and the back of the desk is still black.  I can tackle that another time!

Once the exterior had been stripped down I lined the inside with pages from an old book (this one).

Ta da!  It looks much better, and it feels better too – bare wood is infinitely nicer to the touch than gloss paint!  I can now settle down comfortably at it next week, and not go blind from squinting

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Boot sale bargains (part 6)

I can’t believe that it’s September already, this month has flown by.  Still, time waits for no man and so on Sunday just gone I made the usual pilgrimage up to Chiswick with my mother to see what we could find.

I hadn’t intended to spend much money (as I’m broke), and thus hadn’t brought much with me… so it’s good job that I did go with my mother as I had to rely on her purse in the end.  Bargains really do need to be snapped up when you see them, they might not be there when you go back!
First up is this fabulous vintage school desk.  I’ve wanted one of these since I built the studio in my garden, but they’re usually far too expensive (ranging from £40 for a single desk to £100 for a double like this one), so I’ve had to reluctantly walk away from all the others.  This one has been painted black at some point, but the wood is sound and I intend to strip it back to the bare wood at some point (probably next year).  Bargain price of £35, from the very nice man who sold me a trunk this time last year!

It’s the perfect size.  I’ve removed the two cheap and cheerful Ikea desks I had in there, and this one allows room at the end for the cupboard I bought last month!  Of course I had to half empty my studio and tidy up again in order to rearrange everything, but it was definitely worth it.

Next up we have a load of DVDs… this first lot ranged from 50p to £1 each (Sleeping Beauty was a particular bargain, Disney classics are usually £5 upwards)…

… and then I just couldn’t help myself when I saw all eight series of Charmed… a bargaintastic £30, and they threw in the Back to the Future trilogy as a freebie!

That lot ought to keep me entertained for the foreseeable future while I work in my studio!

Last up from Chiswick this month were some nice wooden boxes.  The first one was 50p, and the second one £2 – I plan to make a miniature book to fit into each section.

A trip to the boot sale wouldn’t be complete without books of some description, and I was pleased to find some more Enid Blyton books at 50p each.

These last items weren’t from Chiswick, but I picked them up on Saturday at a sale being held by a prop hire company.  It was a pretty random discovery, I passed by their premises when I was on my way back from the tip and saw them setting up tables so I went back a couple of hours later to have a rummage.  Lovely old cigar boxes, sturdier than the usual ones I get, £1 each.

That’s it for this month, and I do need to be a little more frugal so hopefully I won’t see anything too tempting next time!

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Boot sale bargains (part 5)

Don’t worry, although it’s been a couple of months since I last visited the Chiswick boot sale I didn’t go mad and buy a door (although I do love that someone actually had a door to sell!).  The weather was pretty good: light showers on and off through the morning, but really warm.  I was there super-early this month as my mother said it would be better… I normally get there for about 7.30am but this time we were there for 6.30am instead.

I’m not convinced about getting there that extra hour early.  People are still setting up their stalls (and, in fact, were still driving in for the first hour) so there’s a lot more walking involved as you end up going round and round repeatedly to see what else has been unloaded.  Obviously you get first dibs on stuff, but I’m of the opinion that you can’t miss what you’ve never seen.

Anyway, shall we skip forward to the interesting part?  Here’s what I bought:

Three old diaries (£5 in total).  I really liked the covers on these, particularly the adverts on the back.  I have a mind to turn these into notebooks (there’s a surprise!), but the actual pages are pretty interesting too as these are used diaries… I shall have to think carefully about what I’m going to do with them.

Some more DVDs to add to my collection (£1 each).

A gorgeous vintage book of minutes which, as you can see from the second photo, is huge!  The inside of this book is as delightful as the cover.

It’s full of handwritten minutes (look at that lovely neat handwriting) interspersed with the odd typed memo or letter that’s been pasted in.  Just beautiful.

This is a bit random, but it’s a cigarette card album  and (impressively) it’s complete.  All 50 cards are in there, and it’s in good condition to boot!  I have no earthly use for this but at just £1 it would have been daft not to buy it.

Another random purchase… I’ve still got a box full of old mortgage deeds to use up, so I didn’t really need any more.  However it was the address that made me buy it:

My fella is from Leek, just down the road from Hanley (and thus the phrase “up ‘anley, duck” is not unfamiliar to me).

It’s in great condition so once I’ve shown it to my sin-laws (who are due for a visit to London at the end of September) I’ll add it to the box with the others in my studio.

Three good sized jars (£5 in total).  Don’t really need more jars at the moment, but they always come in handy don’t they?

A set of nesting tins which I really like.  No use for them at the moment, but perhaps after we’ve redecorated the kitchen (some time this decade, if Brent Council pull their finger out and approve our loft plans…) I might use them for tea, coffee and sugar.  These were just £3.

Last, but certainly not least, this fabulous little cupboard.  I love this style, and at £8 it was a real bargain (let’s face it, I couldn’t build one for that little!).  I have vague plans of it being a bedside cabinet once the loft is done.  At the moment I’ve managed to find room for it in my studio (where it’s now home to my Gocco printers and supplies).

I was very restrained with my spending this month, there were loads more things I wanted to buy, but couldn’t really justify.  Still, I’m pleased with what I did buy, and already looking forward to the next one!

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Downsizing…

That there, in the photo above, is my usual sketch kit.  Sketchbook, watercolours, water brushes, and pens.  All of those things are pretty much essential (I do have a small pencil case which usually houses the water brushes and pens, but it’s gone walkabouts…), but overall do take up quite a bit of space in my handbag.

What to do?  Well I could downsize my sketchbook, which is something I’m considering for the next incarnation, but as I’ve just started this book it’s not really practical to change it right now.  So that leaves the watercolours.

The set I’ve been using for the past few years is the Cotman Sketchers’ Pocket Box, and it’s been a good little servant.  The selection of colours is fine, although I have added my own colours (Winsor Newton artists’ water colour, from tubes) in the little area that originally held a brush.  It is a bit bulky though and the Cotman water colours aren’t as richly pigmented as the artists’ water colours, something which I’ve been wanting to remedy for a while.  I’ve toyed with the idea of buying a bijou box, but they cost around £50 and that’s quite an investment.

Downsizing my watercolours has therefore been on my mind for a while, and when I was away in Norfolk last week I spotted a lovely little vintage tin in a secondhand shop and snapped it up at once as it was the perfect size for what I had in mind.

Doesn’t look very inspiring at the moment, but bear with me.  The transformation was an easy process – I bought some Fimo clay and fitted it into the inside of the tin, then made some wells in it.  This required a bit of trial and error as I knew how many wells I needed, but finding the right sized thing to make the wells proved challenging – in the end it was the round knob at the top of a wooden knitting needle that did the trick!  Once I’d made wells in the Fimo I stuck the tin in the oven and baked it as per the Fimo instructions.  After it had come out of the oven and cooled down I coated the inside of the lid with white enamel paint to create a mixing palette.

See, that looks much better!  The last stage was the easiest, squeezing my tube paints into the wells and letting them dry.  I did invest in some new tube paints for this (and invest is the right word, artists’ water colours aren’t cheap) and it would have been cheaper to just buy a bijou box… but it doesn’t take much paint to fill the wells, and I reckon I could fill each of them three times from the tubes I’ve got, so in the long term it does work out cheaper.

For those who are interested, these are the colours I’ve got in there (left to right)

• Top row: Permanent Rose, Winsor Violet, Winsor Lemon, Olive Green
• Middle row: Scarlet Lake, Winsor Blue (red shade), Raw Sienna, Hooker’s Green
• Bottom row: Permanent Alizarin Crimson, Burnt Sienna, Neutral Tint, Titanium White (opaque white)

And did the downsizing work? Well…

…size-wise, yes it did.  BUT (and it’s a big but) the new tin weighs a surprising amount for its size; I didn’t expect the Fimo to weigh quite as much as it actually does.  That’s a bit of a down side and I’m now keeping a look out for something else to turn into a watercolour set instead (I’m thinking perhaps an eyeshadow compact, so I can clean it out and use the existing palette).  I do like this little tin though, and will be using it from now on as, weight aside, it does take up less space in my bag (and even fits into most of my pockets) which is a good thing.  I might also, once the paints have been used up, remove the Fimo (I checked and it can be eased out!) and replace it with a more lightweight something or other.  We shall see.  For now I’ll leave you with a photo of my sketch kit as it will look for the foreseeable future.

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Project 365 – Day 185

3rd July 2012 – “Vintage hardware”

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A Moleskine mud pie

Matt called me on Friday and I couldn’t answer because I was covered in glue and ink.  When I eventually rang him back he asked what I’d been up to, and I said “making mud pies” … he was, naturally, a bit baffled.  I imagine you are too.

Making mud pies is something I think of as fun and pointless.  You do it when you’re a kid, but when you’re grown up you don’t any more.  So, for me, making a mud pie is something that I do in my studio which is both fun and pointless.

So, what exactly was I doing in my studio on Friday?  Well, I wanted to do something but didn’t really have the energy or focus to work on anything important (I have a couple of commissions which need starting, but Friday just wasn’t a day for that sort of thing).

If you’re a regular reader you’ll know that I stash things, which are often very random, away until I can find a use for them.  Amongst the random things I’ve accumulated were some old Moleskine covers that someone else had discarded.  Two were resurrected into new notebooks and went to new homes quite some time ago, but there was one left.

I didn’t feel in the mood for making a notebook but I did want to do something so I just got on with it and started work.  I had no real aim in mind, other than perhaps experimenting with some inking techniques.  First I covered it with pages from a vintage road atlas…

… then I added a strip of leather to the spine and had a play with some Distress Inks (by Tim Holtz) to give both the edges of the cover and the leather itself a slightly aged/vintaged look…

That random square of leather is just there to show you what the original colour of the leather was before I got all distressy with the ink.  By this stage I’d decided what this was going to be: a sort of folder/folio type thing for holding letters and stationery.  I write a lot of letters, and I figured this would be a good way to tote letters, stationery and stamps around when I’m away from home for a few days.  On that theme I decided to use some brown parcel paper (also slightly distressed with ink) to line the inside.

Looking good, huh?

I’m chuffed to bits with my little mud pie.  It looks great, it’s useful (which is not in the mud pie spirit at all), and I spent a very happy morning in my studio creating it.  I also got to grips with the Distress Inks (which are still quite new to me) and have the satisfaction of having used up yet another bit of tat that was taking up precious studio space.  I’m away for a short break by the seaside at the moment and the mud pie is full of letters, cards, and stamps so that I can catch up with my letters while sitting on the beach (if the weather holds).

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The Road to Life…

… and The Express Ready Reckoner are the two newest additions to my Etsy shop.

 

I picked up these lovely books at the beginning of May, and they’ve now been transformed into notebooks (or sketchbooks, if you prefer, as the pages of these are 140gsm cartridge paper).  Click here to view the revamped vintage book section of my Etsy shop.

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