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It was a long old time ago that I first began thinking about improving our kitchen corner. You might remember this post here. Even if it weren’t clearly dated, I would still know how long ago it was, because the coy reference I made in it to being a ‘bit under the weather‘ was in fact my being wracked by absolutely horrendous morning sickness, the result of which is currently 6 months old, and angelically asleep in her grobag upstairs.

Remember this corner?

The wardrobe was bugging me, and accumulating rubbish. The whole thing had some potential, I thought, as a display place for children’s art. So I ebayed the wardrobe, flirted briefly with the idea of putting an old telephone box there, and plotted. My ideal of putting an easel in the corner, and painting a bit of the wall in blackboard paint, was rather thwarted by not going to Ikea to buy said easel, and by the double whammy of not being quite sure where our blackboard paint is, and not having the time to do any painting whatsoever.

So I decided to put stuff up on the walls. Of course. (Turns out I am a bit fond of doing this). And here’s how it looks now.
      You’ll note the appliance on the floor. Turns out that a tumble drier, whilst not exactly essential to modern existence, is pretty damned handy when you have three children. My long-term plan is to convert the downstairs bathroom into a toilet room and small utility room, and the tumble drier can then find a permanent home there.
But for the moment here it is, churning out dry towels and bedding in industrial quantities and saving the day – well – daily.

IT all started with finding a way to display the copious amounts of art that the girls now produce. It’s been accumulating on the fridge, and looking a bit scruffy. I had decided on a clothes-line type solution, and planning to buy a curtain line from Ikea, when I suddenly decided I should, for once, stop putting off home decisions until after I’d been to the Swedish superstore of dreams, and instead just do it.

I decided to use ribbon, and hooks. I was half-resolved in this plan of action, then became totally determined after seeing two friends with clothes line-type set-ups in their houses (thank you Sarah, and Elli) and suddenly fearing that clothes lines with pegs and children’s art might be having a moment, and that I was missing out. I also reasoned that if I didn’t like it, it would be cheap to replace, and easy to remove.

And guess what? I love it. It does everything I need it to. I can quickly change around and remove the artwork, it holds art of all shapes and sizes, and it turns it into a bit of a feature rather than just clogging up the fridge.

My ribbon bag (have I mentioned my ribbon bag? I love my ribbon bag.) was stuffed with red gingham ribbon after a Christmas wrapping frenzy involving this, brown paper, candy canes, and tiny bells a couple of years ago. After spending far too much time thinking about different kinds of hooks,in the end I just used little cable clips to fasten the ribbon to the wall. I honestly can’t believe this didn’t occur to me before. They are so cheap as to be almost free, tiny, and basically invisible once I’d tied the ribbon in a bow.

These pictures show the ribbons adorned with slightly sad, weather-beaten grey-brown wooden pegs. This was because I was on a roll, and not to be held back in my zeal by missing materials. So you will have to trust me (and await an updated photo) when I tell you that I have since ordered red and white polka-dotted pegs from ebay, and pretty splendid they look, too.

I am especially pleased with the plates above the ribbon display. For ages I’d been staring at these two empty walls whilst I ate, weighing up the relative benefits of hanging up my Rob Ryan plates there, or putting artwork up, when suddenly in a Damascean moment one day I realised I could in fact do both. I found these rather brilliant plate hangers which glue onto the back of plates, and promise faithfully not to fall off, and then just tapped little picture hooks into the wall and – voila!

I have a complete soft spot for papercut art, and Rob Ryan’s is fabulous. My favourite plate reads, ‘Other planets cannot be as beautiful as this one‘. Perfect.

Once this was all sorted in my head, I just needed to decide what to do on the other wall.

I spent quite some time arranging these frames on the kitchen table, trying to get a balance that looked right. I went through my frames pile and pulled out ones that were white or largely white, and then moved them around, and moved them around. It was frustrating as they were almost there,but not quite. I kept shifting, squinting, and shifting, when I suddenly let out a ‘Eureka!’ and ran upstairs, coming back down moments later with two small heart-shaped ornaments in my hand, to the visible bemusement of my husband.

The hanging hearts (originally in our bedroom, but since it was redecorated, awaiting a new home) were perfect.  They are pretty, light, and white enough to link in with the rest of the frames. I love the look of hanging up small items in amongst pictures, and on the right hand side they provided just enough balance to the rest of the frames. Once I added them to my kitchen table configuration, suddenly the whole thing worked.

This mirror was a Christmas present years ago. It was on the wall of our old front room, and has been seeking a home ever since.

These picture frames I picked up in a second hand charity sale in my local church for a pound or two. They were a brassy gold colour, with old postcards in, but I spray painted them white thinking they’d come in handy one day. They need another coat or two, and I am not sure what photos I will put in them eventually (these pictures are just placeholders), but they are making me smile in the meantime.

This multi-aperture frame was another Christmas present, and like the mirror has been languishing in the ‘pile of stuff to be put on the wall’ which has been threatening to take over one corner of our study.

This leapt into my hands when I was last in a branch of Tiger, and I bought it before I really knew what I was doing. My sister and father thought it looked like a dolls house (and in fairness, perhaps that is why I like it) but I think of it like a modern take on a printer’s tray. I’d like to fill it with very small, white things. I have a vision of a little tiny white teapot in it, and a tiny white silhouette of some kind. But as with the clothes pegs above, I also didn’t want to wait. So for the moment it contains one Barbie shoe, one fairy ornament, and not a whole lot else. I do like it, though. I like it on its own, but I particularly like how the square shapes of the tray mirror the boxiness of the multi-aperture frame, above.

This wooden moulding was from Cox and Cox. Since I bought it, in a moment’s indulgence, I have at various points planned to put it in almost every room in our house. It seemed for a while as if there were not one single space in our home that might not benefit from a random piece of moulded wood hung up on it, and I struggled to think how I would choose where to put it. But when I first hung the frames up, there was a space at the top. Like so:

And when Oli saw it, he paused and said, “Doesn’t it need something at the top?”
And I was annoyed with him, because I feel myself to be rather superior to him in matters of the home, so I snappily said, “No. Why?”

Then I looked at it again, and saw he was right. And this was somehow even more annoying. But once I’d admitted it to myself, and to him, I hung up the wooden moulding and we both relaxed a little. Ah! There it was.

And here it is. Our new kitchen corner. It is undeniably ‘busy’, but I think a certain kind of happy busy-ness will undeniably be part of our kitchen, especially whilst the girls are small. Whilst I keep being drawn to, and resolutely pinning pictures of beautiful, monochrome, minimalist kitchens on Pinterest, I don’t think that this look is necessarily either achievable or desirable for us right now.

Our kitchen has always had some blue in it, and lately also a bit of red. But in hanging up the printers tray, and the artwork, I started to see how our kitchen might look in the medium term if I can do it up a bit: a white background, white painted wood, with multi-coloured accents, largely of red and blue.

Another small pleasing thing in this corner: my KLM Delft house. I spotted a row of these at a local market, baulked a little at the price, and subsequently snaffled this one on ebay for about a fiver including postage. I confess that I have since bought one more, which is on its way to me.

For now it sits alone on our plate rack, co-ordinating rather beautifully with our wedding crockery, and adding a little whimsy to our kitchen corner of lovely things.

I take it all back. In my last post about labelling things, I may have mentioned a blogger who made her own labels. And – I’ll confess – my tone may have been a little mocking. In fact, what I actually said was:

‘I had a good read of this blog (so happy! So very, very American!) where she gives lots of details about how to make your own labels. And as with so many detailed sets of instructions about how to do things, I found that all the various steps described (Excel! Print! Mount! Laminate!…) made me feel like putting away the laptop, and having a little lie down.’

Well, never let it be said that I’m not prepared to admit when I’m wrong. After putting the chalkboard labels onto the girls’ drawers, I had a bit of a rush of blood to the head. I looked around the whole house with label-obsessed eyes, and started to see the potential for labels almost everywhere. I started to wonder, in fact, whether the answer to everything (how to have a beautiful, organised, perpetually tidy house, and live a glamorous, and relaxed life, pottering about in wafty clothes, trailing a lovely scarf and the whiff of Jo Malone after oneself, instead of a trail of snotty tissues, and Disney Princess dolls in various states of undress) was in fact not baskets, as I’d previously suspected, but labels.

Or maybe baskets with labels on them?

Ok, ok, ok. So I totally went back on my mocking tone last time, and threw myself into the spirit of home-made labels. I decided that labelling more receptacles in the girls’ room might have many benefits: the slight ‘Blue Peterishness’ of the labels would not look so out of place in a child’s room, the lettering could provide some early readng practice, and maybe labels that were easy to decipher might encourage the girls to do some tidying up themselves. (On which more later…)

I went the whole hog. I repented of my mocking words: I used Excel. I printed. I mounted. Reader, I laminated. I obediently followed all the instructions that my American friend helpfully posted here. In the end, I was so pleased with the result that I made several, and even once I’d put them up, I kept sneaking back into the girls’ room to admire them. That evening, I become a fully-fledged, paid-up, bona-fide labels geek.

I decided to label the Trofast drawers that were holding an assortment of the dressing up clothes.  I thought we might use them more effectively, too. So I started by empting them out and making some piles, and dividing those piles up into categories: hats (or rather, ‘headgear’ including tiaras, etc.), bags, shoes, etc. I decided that my labels should have large letters on them, plus a small image for the benefit of non-reading two year olds.

I was particularly pleased with the backing that I found. A quick google for printables yielded this highly jolly design: multi-coloured triangles laid out in a way that looks rather like bunting. Remember the curtains in the girls’ room?

I like how the design seems to mirror that. And of course the bunting that is strung up above the dressing up clothes. It is perhaps a little excessive to match the design of the mounting paper of one’s labels to the fabric of one’s curtains, but nevertheless it is a small detail that gives me pleasure.

So here they are in all their glory. Please excuse, as ever, the explosion of taffeta and polyester that is the hooks on the left. And also the drawers on the right are not quite complete: one drawer is downstairs, full of water beads for playing with, another is slightly cracked and its replacement depends upon our long-awaited trip to Ikea.

And the most surprising thing is – they work! I was upstairs this week looking for India’s shoes, realised that by some miracle they’d not been discarded in the middle of the floor… was looking around trying to imagine I was two, and wondering where I would put them…

Of course! I opened up the ‘shoes’ drawer and there they were, nestled alongside the glittery Mary-Janes, and the feather-bedecked Disney shoes. I was rather touched by the idea of India, in her room, looking about her for somewhere to place her shoes, noticing the label with the picture on it, and tucking them into the dressing up shoes drawer. Brilliant.

The only problem, in fact, is how to secure the lovely labels to the drawers. Currently, like determined little lemmings with a deathwish, they keep peeling themselves off and landing on the floor. The glue dots that I used to secure them to the drawers and the basket are evidently not quite cutting it. I could obviously just superglue them on, but am loath to as I’d like them to be peelable so I can change them around if necessary. Does anyone have any ideas?!

Just as I never intended for this blog to become a record of child-based home improvements, I similarly never intended for what few craft activities I do have time for to be solely those for dolls or made on a miniature scale.

But here we are. The time available for making stuff (I resist saying ‘crafting’. It sounds American. Not to say pretentious and a bit wrong) is very limited. And the benefits of making things that are small are manifold. They are fast! And cheap! And require little time or space. And mentally, they are easier to start, since they feel risk free. After all, if halfway through your double-bed-size patchwork quilt, you decide you’re not so keen on the design after all, you’re really in quite a bit of trouble. Whereas anything for a doll… well, as my friend Jo said, ‘Dolly doesn’t mind‘. And she’s right.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that Dolly (in this case, ‘Baby Isla’) looks rather snug and pleased with herself. As well she should, as she reclines upon a dolls’ bed that is spray painted, with a hand-made mattress, removeable sheet, pillow, pillowcase, patchwork quilt, and crochet blanket, if you please.

I definitely didn’t start personalising this bed intending it to become some kind of kitsch handmade in miniature exercise. But I seem to have got rather carried away. Bear with me. To begin with, I started making bedding partly to personalise the bed (the fabulous value but rather plain Ikea dolls’ bed that almost everyone I know seems to own) but also in order to practise with my new sewing machine. I could remember vaguely how to sew, but didn’t want to start anything too scary or expensive until I felt more confident. Similarly, I had some hazy aspirations to make patchwork quilts, but didn’t know where to start. Sewing this little quilt was a great way of overcoming a mental hurdle and realising it was all quite simple, whilst also learning how to sew binding on,  how to quilt, and also a good way of making some mistakes in a place that didn’t really matter.

I was guided in my making by the memory, as ever, of what I would have liked as a little girl. I was in some ways, a serious and exacting child, so specifically, this meant no shortcuts. I covered the foam mattress with an old pillow case, then painstakingly sewed an elastic-cornered, removeable spotty sheet. (So far, of course, none of the girls has ever shown any interest in taking it off, or indeed done anything that betrays they’ve even noticed it is removeable…) In making the sheet, I discovered that there is a reason why sewing instructions say ‘press seams open’. Which was funny, as I’d evidently previously thought that they just put this in for fun. But I digress….

And then I learnt to crochet. I went to a totally fabulous local course where a whole bunch of us learnt to crochet, and another group learnt to knit. The process of sitting down and focussing, coupled with being creative, and with learning a completely new skill and seeing it come on steadily every week (not to mention the chat, the tea and the cake), was so brilliantly therapeutic and enjoyable that I’ve signed myself up again next term to learn to knit.

I found myself wanting to crochet something, thinking of blankets, thinking of king size throws, musing on organic wool and bamboo/ cotton blends … and once again contemplating potential expense and time in slightly melancholy fashion. I also found I really wanted to make something with ‘granny squares’, but realised that I didn’t necessarily really like many of the things that are made in this design. And the answer to all of these things, naturally, was more dolls’ bedding.

There was another advantage, too, which was that I was pretty sure the girls would love it. I had started to notice how Rosa and India would consistently use the dolls’ patchwork blanket in their games, removing it from the bed and spreading it out on the floor as a ‘picnic blanket’ usually. But when it came time to tidy up, I would often retrieve it from some corner of the room where it had been tucked, and it seemed to me that they would enjoy having another blanket to use in their endless round of teddy picnics, and princess parties.

I followed a tutorial online to make a rectangular blanket as I felt very strongly that I didn’t want it to be square. The tutorial was a bit scary (alarming manicure, but perhaps I am too closed-minded about these things) but very simple. Once I’d done the rectangular centre, I could happily treble my way around and around and around, in a soothingly mindless way, in the car, in front of the TV, anywhere… I found there was something rather meditative about it.

I am most pleased with the colours. Which is funny, really, since they were completely serendipitious. Which is to say, unplanned. I bought a bag of small rainbow odds and ends and just crocheted them together depending on what size the balls were, and whether I thought I’d have enough to do another round or not. I love them. I would never have combined these myself, but I not only like the way they look together, I also love how they go with the rainbow colours I already have on the dolls’ bed. This close up (above) is rather pleasing to me. Like a landscape of wool. Or a geometrically pebbly beach.

So there we have it. I learnt to crochet. I love it. I have added ‘make crochet things’ to the end of my long list of things I would like to spend more time on. The girls love it. Rosa spotted it as soon as I put it out, and gravitated towards it shouting, “Oh wow!” in what I can only describe as a highly gratifying manner. I do fully intend that at some point in the future, my entire house might be as beautifully appointed as this dolls bed. Perhaps my sofas will be piled high with crocheted blankets, my beds heaped with patchwork, and lovingly covered with handmade sheets.
At some point.
Maybe.

Until then, a bientot.

      I do love to sort things out. But it’s a sad fact that things which are sorted out have a strange tendency to un-sort themselves. For ages I have happily blamed Oli for this, accusing him of spending his time purposefully undoing the lovely storage and sorting systems I have created.

But it occurred to me recently, as I was hauling open a drawer, and wondering whether the pyjama bottoms in it belonged to Rosa or to India, that actually, it may not be entirely his fault. And I realised (with the kind of flash of inspiration that I seem to be reserving for the blindingly obvious at the moment. I blame baby brain) that in a house of two adults, three children, and one cleaner, it is just NO GOOD organising things if the receptacles into which they are organised are only recognisable to me. It’s not helpful. If I forget which is the basket for the charity shop, and which is the shelf for the single sheets as opposed to the double sheets, then what hope does anyone else have?

I realised that from here on in, labels would be my friend. And I turned my attentions firstly to the chest of drawers in the girls’ room.

Remember this? It was no longer needed by my aunt and uncle, and gratefully received by us. The drawers are just a little bit ill-fitting, and in an ideal world, I would like to paint it, perhaps a funky colour like a leafy green, or bright turquoise. But here we are in our less than ideal world, the time available to me for repainting is precisely zero, and it has ten lovely drawers to hold tonnes of clothing belonging to small children. Perfect.

Perfect, that is, apart from the constant question about what belongs where. Not helped by my periodic reorganising of the drawers, as the quantities of different types of clothes ebb and flow, depending on the vagaries of growth spurts, hand-me-downs and the Boden sale.

I had a good read of this blog (so happy! So very, very American!) where she gives lots of details about how to make your own labels. And as with so many detailed sets of instructions about how to do things, I found that all the various steps described (Excel! Print! Mount! Laminate!…) made me feel like putting away the laptop, and having a little lie down. Besides which, I knew that I would want to change things around so I needed something that was, if not exactly temporary, certainly easy to change.

Something nagged at my memory, and I returned to my pinterest boards where I found the answer. Chalkboard labels! Of course. I could stick them on the drawers, buy a chalkboard pen (who knew such things existed?) label the drawers, and just wipe the labels and change them around if I needed to. A quick hunt found me some from a UK seller, here on ebay, and I was away.

Obviously even with such a small job there was a problem with all this. And that problem is rather beautifully illustrated by poor Persephone’s cross face in the picture above, namely the constant presence of various small children. But I managed to distract the children, write the labels, and stick them onto the drawers.

I love them. I can’t say how much I love them. I think the flute-y shape of the labels is inobtrusive, but attractive. And although I just used my neatest ‘maybe I should have been a primary school teacher‘ writing on them, I love the way it looks. In my generally optimistic way, I wonder whether the labels will give Rosa a bit of extra, purposeful reading practice, too?

What they will definitely do is make the job of putting clothes away rather faster for me and Oli. So in essence they look good, are highly functional, and will save us time. I call that a win-win.

And after some hesitant enquiry (“What you doin’?” …) India has decided she approves as well.

Result.

Regular readers (and a big ‘hello‘ to both of you) will know I’m a sucker for personalised art.

The vague ‘to buy’ list I carry around in my head of stuff for the house is not committed to paper, nor to Word document or blog entry, partly for fear that it’s massive length will finally finish off the rainforests or break the internet. But partly also because there is a chance that there would be so very much personalised art on it that I would have to confess to myself that even the aching empty expanse that is most of the walls in this house is still not large enough to contain it. I sometimes have a look through the personalised section of ‘not on the high street’… but have to stop myself because I start to dribble on the keyboard.

Another great love of mine is lettering. I know we’re all supposed to be over filling our homes full of big letters, and three dimensional exhortations to ‘believe’, ‘eat’, ‘bathe’, etc. But I can’t help it. I still love them.

So you’ll understand that a piece of artwork like this is my fatal flaw.  And I mean that in a good way.

A personalised name dictionary definition print. Be still, my beating heart. Fabulously and touchingly personalised and just stuffed with lovely lettering. And what is the only thing that could make it even better? It’s designed and sold by my lovely and enterprising sister on etsy. Yup, the same one who made our ‘likes’ posters. I am more than a little in awe of how creative and entrepreneurial she is.

I love it. I love the phonetic pronunciation guide at the top. I love how it looks like a very serious dictionary definition until you start to read it more carefully. The realist in me fears that probably it would be overkill to get one for each member of our family when we already have our ‘likes’ pictures up in pride of place in the hall. (Where, incidentally, they are oft admired, and only occasionally knocked onto the floor.) But I am seriously wondering about a definition print for our family surname, which is Oli’s and mine combined and hence completely made up and strange pretty unusual.

Anyway. I am hoping that as Persephone gets bigger and more predictable, and as the evenings draw out, I will attack some more corners of our house with renewed vigour. But for the moment I just thought I’d blog about this, as it’s rather lovely. If you think so too, you can get one of your very own from here. Enjoy!

Brace yourselves.

If you have small children, and a house full of stuff, then I am going to share with you the kind of blindingly obvious storage solution that could change your life.

Hooks. Lovely, useful, cheap, wonderful hooks. I never met a door that I didn’t want to hang hooks on the back of. The lack of hooks on the back of the doors of cheap hotels and bed and breakfasts is a major bugbear of mine. Where are you supposed to hang your dressing gown (your hat, your coat, and your carrier bag of stuff) if there isn’t a hook on the back of the door? That is not a rhetorical question. I mean it. Where?!

So it’s not surprising to find that many, if not in fact all of the doors in our house have hooks lovingly screwed into the back of them. Hooks on our bedroom door for – obviously – dressing gowns, and scarves and the like. Hooks on the back of the study door for Rosa’s bike helmet, the camera, the bag of ‘car toys’ etc. Hooks on the back of the girls’ door for their dressing gowns, and other sundries. Hooks on the back of the kitchen door for the carrier bag holder, the girls’ aprons, umbrellas, and a bag of bibs.

But. But but but. There was something a little dis-satisfying about all this hookery. And the dis-satisfyingness was twofold. It started in the kitchen. Not only were the hooks on the back of the door so full of stuff that it was hard to squeeze through the door (especially in the latter half of last year, if you were pregnant and the size of a small planet. Ahem.) But it was also really deeply irritating that the girls couldn’t reach their dressing gowns in their bedroom. In fact, the fact that they couldn’t reach them at all, and didn’t have a hope of reaching them, made the row of hooks look rather foolish. Decorative. Hopelessly unfunctional.

It was then that I realised the answer to all this was staring me in the face. Or, perhaps more literally, the answer was staring me in the waist.

Remember the post rack in the hall? We’re still very much in love. But below said lovely post rack is one of my proudest innovations. The half-height coat hooks.

They are a set of multi-coloured ‘ball’ style hooks from GLTC, and I think they have much to commend them. They take some of the coat ‘load’ off our adult hooks. They look pretty damn cute. And it means that the girls can hang up and retrieve their own coats, under their own steam. Sometimes.

I put up a small row of pictures above them, which are just framed greetings cards from the Museum of Childhood, when they had their Judith Kerr exhibition. Mog and the Tiger who came to tea are perennial favourites over here, and if someone were asked, on pain of death, whether the under 5s or me get more pleasure out of those pictures… well, it would be a pretty close run thing.

So: of course. I kicked myself for being so foolishly slow, even as I congratulated myself on solving another small house dilemma. Half height hooks. Why not have more of them? A quick trip to Homebase was all it took.

The girls’ room was first on my list. Try to ignore, if you can, the glaring orange of the knotty pine of their door, and instead note that there is now a set of hooks at the top of the door, and also halfway down it, where their dressing gowns reside. This means that if, say, it’s a bit nippy, and I’m feeding Persephone, Rosa can run upstairs and get her own dressing gown, and sometimes even be prevailed upon to fetch her sister’s, too. This is what I call a result. Maternal laziness combined with some vague notion of ‘fostering independence.’

The kitchen was next on my list. This time you have to ignore both the garish wood, and also the bare plasterwork on the left hand wall. Once you get past that, the hooks are pleasing, aren’t they? This time they’ve got the girls’ cooking aprons on them, their umbrellas, and their Little Life backpacks. Perfect.

So there you have it. Half height hooks. Blindingly, stupidly obvious, but nonetheless new to me. Doubling the storage space that the back of your door offers, and making it accessible to littlies, to boot. In a very uninformed way, I have these kind of hooks in my head as being ‘a little bit Montessori’, too. I have no real basis for this, save that when I read this blog entry about a Montessori teacher’s room for her (then unborn) baby boy, I was so blown away by the whole thing, and so torn between wanting to deride her and wanting to BE HER, that the only thing I really took away from it was how striking it was that everything in the room was so low-level. It had genuinely been put together with a small person in mind.

While we are on hooks, I may step on my soap box for a moment to share my view that it is pointless investing money in really expensive hooks. There are some lovely ones out there, but it’s really not worth it. Just get a good quality, sturdy set. For a start, any hooks you do get may well be hidden on the back of your door. But also, they will be largely hidden by whatever you hang on them. My gorgeous GLTC hooks I make an honourable exception for, since their brightly coloured loveliness sometimes pokes through the mountains of coats, and brightens things up a bit. I also think that the rainbow-ness of them nicely compliments the jolly, bright colours that dominate my children’s coats. But for elsewhere, well, it’s all very well magazine articles showing us a beautiful set of designer hooks fashioned from driftwood and vintage porcelain,with a hand-knitted woollen cream scarf draped on one hook, and a slate-blue velvet fitted jacket on a padded hanger swinging wistfully from another…

That is not what hooks will look like in a real house. They will be covered in mounds of coats, jackets, bags, rainwear, scarves, and more. They will be almost invisible. But they will still be brilliantly, wonderfully useful.

Christmas has sneaked up on me a little this year. Obviously the nature of Christmas is that, even though we all know perfectly well about the passage of time, and the date on which it falls, we are all still legally required once over the age of eighteen to spend every day of December gasping with disbelief about how soon Christmas is. You can even vary the ways you describe the time still to go, for added shock factor: “X shopping days ’til Christmas!”, “Only ONE weekend left until Christmas!”, “13 sleeps…!” etc. etc.

But I have been doubly surprised this year, both by losing a month to the blur of late pregnancy, birth, and a newborn, and then more cruelly and less predictably, losing a weekend that I’d mentally earmarked as ‘Christmas begins here’ and instead spending that weekend in hospital with Persephone, who had bronchiolitis. (It was a very sad couple of days, but she’s much, much better now.)

But here we are. December the 12th. And I wanted to share, only a little belatedly, some of the advent calendar action going on in our house this year.

I LOVE advent calendars. I just love everything about them. I think it’s the heady combination of nostalgia, the joy of anticipation, and a fair dollop of unashamed greed and delight at the prospect of starting each day with a portion of chocolate. I love chocolate advent calendars (although – foil wrapped, please), I love decent picture advent calendars, and I particularly love ‘other’ calendars. Three dimensional ones, or ones made of material.

So we retrieved Rosa’s advent chest from the attic, and I set about filling it up. My Mum bought this for Rosa as a Christmas present a few years ago, and she is just now at the age where she can not only enjoy it, but also remember it from last year. Rosa was adamant that it should contain chocolate buttons – because this was what I put in it last year-  and I was torn between boredom at it being just the same, and pride at my stubborn small person with her respect for traditions and a great memory…

The really lovely thing about this chest is that my Mum also bought a set of advent charms to go with it, so each day Rosa can open the chest, scoff down her chocolate button, and then hang up that day’s advent charm in the frame above.

But is that enough? No! I read with envy on The Imagination Tree about Anna’s ever-creative ideas for crafty loveliness with her children, and last year I was much taken with her idea of an advent activity tree. Thankfully just a smidgen of realism interceded into my Christmas reverie. Hence rather than start creating our own, then spending all of December berating myself for not finishing it, I instead remembered this blog post I found via Pinterest, where a rather enterprising and handy American has provided a whole set of advent activity slips that lazy people such as myself can just print out.

So I did just that. I erred slightly on the side of lazy caution, tending towards those activities that are low effort (sing a Christmas song) rather than those that I might regret at 5.30pm after the school run, when the baby’s crying and my two year old is tantrumming because she’s taken against her coat for some reason. I also found some activities were a bit unlikely (‘go for a sleigh ride’, anyone?) and some a bit American (I would be surprised if I could ‘go to a Christmas parade’, and am not minded to ‘send a Christmas card to our troops in the military’). But there are a hundred activity cards, plus some blanks, so there’s plenty of choice.

In a snatched rare moment of November calm, I printed off the ones I wanted, and put them into two envelopes, which I diligently labelled, ‘advent activities’ and ‘advent activities – reserves list’. I’d originally thought I’d sort through them all in advance, but actually what I do is have a quick riffle through that morning, and pick out one I quite fancy doing that day, then stick it into the chest without Rosa noticing. Lazy, but it works for us.

So this year it was evident that if Rosa was gleefully opening up the doors on her chest each day, India would need to have something of her own. Which is to say that if she didn’t have something of her own, she would throw herself to the floor in misery and start howling and pulling at her hair. In slightly shameless fashion, I therefore emailed my very generous mother to suggest that perhaps she might like to get India her own advent calendar as her present this year. And look!

Isn’t it a beauty? My mum said that she wanted India to have something to ‘do’ each day, just as Rosa gets to hang up her charm. So India has a decoration to velcro onto the tree. We all love it. Rosa loves it so much that she cried with jealousy when we opened it. In fairness, I nearly did, too. India loves it so much that I spend a lot of time distracting her from it, otherwise she wants to get out all of the toys all at once and to hold them, enjoy them, play with them and lose them.

But does that stop me having advent calendar envy? Of course not. You’ll note my advent calendar in the first picture. It’s the Cadbury’s one next to Rosa’s. Bought for me by Oli after I stopped hoping he would develop telepathic powers, and instead said to him directly and plaintively, “I don’t have an advent calendar this year!” I love the one he got me, which may look a little dull next to the tasteful beauty of Rosa’s chest, but makes up for that by having quality chocolates, and a satisfyingly huge looking no.24 door, to boot. But I still covet advent calendars. I can’t help myself.

Picture reproduced by kind permission of Cold Comfort Crafts.

Feast your eyes on this one.  I discovered these fabric advent calendars on a rather lovely blog a couple of years ago, and was immediately thrown into a frenzy of desire. Look at the little bells with which you hang each decoration on the tree! Look at the lovely felty hand-sewn gorgeousness of the decorations! They are hand-made in Scotland, and the very talented creator of these beauties only makes a few each year. They cost a fairly hefty amount of money (I think around £60) but I do think they’re worth it for the amount of time and effort that goes into each one. I have promised myself that in a few years’ time I will treat myself to one.

I think I was actually in the middle of telling Oli that we needed to save some money this year when my eyes fell on this wondrous item in John Lewis. “So if we can just spend a bit less and make sure we make sensible financial decisions and – oh my GOD look at that!”

A wooden advent house, with little drawers for each day. And batteries so you can make the windows light up. There are many reasons why I don’t need to buy this. Including a rather negative review on the JL website about its quality. But that doesn’t stop me wanting it.

In the meantime, Christmas preparation has been continuing apace. Or as best it can in a house that seems full of small children, which is to say in snatched small pieces, in amongst washing, tumble-drying, breastfeeding, loading the dishwasher, turning on CBeebies, and everything else.

I learnt to crochet, and made a few Christmas decorations.

Rosa and I made snowflakes to decorate the kitchen window.

And I – er – abandoned any pretence that it was all for her, and got FAR too into the process and hogged the scissors.

There has been more by way of festive fun happening here, but that will have to wait for another post. I have a snuffling, sleeping newborn on my chest in the sling, and I can tell by her wriggling that she is about to wake up and be very cross with me…

Until next time. May your days be merry and bright, and may all your Christmases be white.

Time for a little playhouse update? Yes- I think so.

You may remember that I shared some grand plans for the playhouse a while back. Have those plans been realised? Hell – no. Not in any way. I do have a good excuse, though. But more on that later.

But, look. It’s looking rather better in there, isn’t it? In essence, I have finished painting the outside. And I have found two little shelving units and mounted them on the walls. It’s the small shelving units that are giving me the most pleasure. (I do like to keep up the pretence that everything I do in the playhouse is an unselfish act carried out only with the pleasure of the girls in mind. This is a big lie. The playhouse is all for MEMEME, and is based on the kind of playhouse that I would have loved as a girl, and that I like to look at now, and any play value for any under 5s who may or may not be allowed into it is entirely incidental. I hope that’s clear…)

These shelves are especially pleasing to me. I found them on ebay, and spray painted them grey. I would have gone for white, but I knew that I wanted the internal walls to be white eventually, and I didn’t want them to be so camouflaged as to be effectively invisible. Of course, I could have asked the girls what colour they wanted them to be… but they would have chanted, “PINK!” in unison. So I just quietly got on with spraying them grey. The bit of these shelves that I am most pleased with, though, is the hooks at the bottom. Yes, these borrow heavily from my inspiration playhouse. And don’t they look amazing? There is something really adorable about the way that the cups hang at the bottom. (Something adorable, and entirely wasted on the girls, who of course immediately take all the cups off, and strew them around the garden…)

We then visited the 99p shop, on the look-out for things to put on the shelves. And the 99p shop rose splendidly to the occasion, yielding a set of purple plastic baskets, a set of metal bowls, and a small green bucket. Even more pleasingly, I realised at the beginning of the summer that what we really needed was a plastic tea-set to live in the playhouse… then remembered that we HAD a plastic teaset, which the girls had been given as a Christmas present, and which I’d carefully stowed away. A quick raid of the attic, and there it was. All the pleasure of buying a new one, with none of the cost.

This little set of drawers I think was originally intended to be a spice rack. It’s missing a drawer, but I don’t think that matters, since it makes the top drawer into a small shelf. I found these drawers at a local fete / festival, where they were on sale for the princely sum of £5. I was particularly pleased with myself, since these kinds of fortuitous finds don’t tend to happen to me very often. I squirreled them away, and after a few days where I flirted with the idea of storing paperclips in them, and hanging them up in the study, eventually went back to my first plan, and hung them up in the playhouse. Where, just as with the plate rack, I find them very pleasing indeed. (Er. Yes. You can also see in this picture how the girls went a bit mad with crayons one day and drew on the interior walls. It was on Oli’s watch, not mine. He told them it was ok, because we would eventually be painting the inside. I raised my eyebrows at him in what I hope was an expressive way.)

So I think we’re getting there. Next is to mend the broken window, paint the internal walls white, and add curtains. Then I think I’d like to find a blackboard. And something more decorative for the walls, maybe a picture or two, and perhaps the letters, ‘I’, ‘R’ and ‘P’, for the girls’ names.

And yes, you read that correctly. Three initial letters, for three lovely girls. I was going to start this post by claiming not to have had a very productive month. Then I realised that I have, whilst undeniably neglecting the house, in fact had a very productive month indeed. The most productive you could imagine, since I produced a baby on the 27th October.

Her name is Persephone, and this is her at less than 24 hours old. She has the grumpiest expression, and the fattest cheeks, in East London. As well she might, arriving at a frankly eye-watering 11lb 5oz. We are all rather taken with her, particularly India, who at 2 years old, was by no means guaranteed to tolerate, let alone like her. India shouts, “Baby Seffie!” excitedly at her every time she sees her, and is so far only grumpy when told she’s can’t hold / kiss / cuddle her on demand.

Persephone’s arrival further cements my desire to find things to do on the house that are a) cheap b) quick and c) child-friendly. The blog updates might be sparse, but they will be coming. Until next time….

My lovely parents came to visit for the weekend, and offered up as a gift, my father’s DIY skills for the duration. This is even better than it sounds, since my father is really very clever. It is my firmly-held belief that he can make anything, and fix anything so I spent quite some time planning out the things I wanted him to get done whilst he was here. (Oh, and I also spent some time looking forward to the pleasure of both parents’ company, naturally….;)

Black-out blinds in our room, in the forlorn hope that cutting out natural light might increase the chances of this new baby not being as bad a sleeper as India was. Those were top of the list. After being at home more on maternity leave, and noticing every day how the constant *drip* … *drip*… was going on, replacing the kitchen tap was another priority.

Putting up shelves in what is now Rosa and India’s room was third on the list. The entire house is nearly over-run with cuddly toys. We love them. Rosa loves them. India loves them. I have had a pretty brutal cull, but there are still thousands of the things underfoot. I decided a couple of shelves in the reading corner alcove would be just what we needed to corall free-range cuddly toys into something a bit more manageable and domesticated. My dad suggested going further; why not shelve all the way up?

And why not indeed? Look at how beautiful they look. With unlimited money, I would get shelves built into almost every room in the house. Shelves above the doors for storage. Shelves all over the basement. Bookshelves galore. Meanwhile, back in the real world, I got a worried phonecall from Oli letting me know that the materials for our shelves were going to cost around £130, and was this ok? Alternatively, we could get MDF, which would be only around £40. I hesitated for a bit, then bit the bullet and decided we should go for it. These would, after all, be decent sturdy shelves, built to last. If we went for wood, I reasoned, it wouldn’t matter if it took me a long time to paint them. And furthermore, they could stay in that room for ever, since – as above – there is not a room in any house that couldn’t benefit from some shelves.

But what of the poor reading corner? Well… it’s still there, only rather subdued. Cut down. No longer does the (redundant, and resolutely un-used) reading corner get to dominate the whole of the alcove in a leisurely, American, ‘I have more house than I know what to do with’ way. Now, it’s reading corner at girl-level, and storage higher up.

The main casualty, in fact, was the ‘read more books’ print, which has been relegated to the very top shelf like a publication of dubious moral worth. I do of course have plans for this print, which probably involve juggling around some pictures on the opposite wall to make space. But for the moment it sits up on the very highest shelf, looking at me reproachfully, as if the very fact of my leaving it there is certain to ensure Rosa hates books, drops out of school with no qualifications and barely literate, and ends up on the streets.

Do you know what my favourite thing about these shelves is? It’s all the empty space. Seriously. I really think that the key with storage space is to create more than you need. Not only to future-proof against additional purchases, but also to give space to spread out, and a chance to display rather than store.

The ‘display / storage’ dichtomy is one that pre-occupies me greatly. All the more so because it appears to be a dichotomy which is totally invisible to all manner of other people – to those who work in interiors magazines, in particular. I cannot count the number of times that I have been assured by various magazines that X, Y or Z piece of furniture represented an ideal storage solution, when X, Y or Z piece of furniture was in fact very small indeed with barely any space to store anything at all. And illustrated in the magazine laden up with one small plant, a beautiful vase, and three hardback, colour-co-ordinated books. This is not storage. After all, no one looks at their home, and thinks, ‘My god, I have a real surfeit of small plants, single beautiful vases, and small collections of colour-co-ordinated hardback books. They are all swilling about underfoot and destroying my feng shui. I must find a solution.’. Repeat after me. This is not storage.This is ‘display‘.

‘Storage’ is the place where you put your family’s wellington boots. it’s the understair cupboard where you can stash your hoover and mop. It’s the attic where all the baby equipment goes, and where you store the Christmas decorations. ‘Storage’ is not a single bookshelf, with a bird’s egg and a piece of driftwood on it. Storage is the set of shelves where all the children’s books are precariously balanced in piles. Or indeed the ottoman in which one wishes to pile up the jigsaw puzzle boxes.Which is not to say that display items of furniture don’t have their place. Cox and Cox is absolutely stuffed with fabulous items for display, many of which I covet fiercely, and have mentally planned places for in our house. But let’s be honest. If I need to find a home for wayward boxes of toys, I’m not going to order this. I’m straight off to Ikea.

Or… straight on the phone to my parents, to ask my Dad to build some more shelves. My immediate plans are to move the cuddly toys where they are currently strewn across several different locations and put them all onto the lwoer shelves. This has the added bonus of freeing up one of the toy baskets in the front room for baby toys. Then the jigsaw puzzles and games are destined for the next shelf up. At some point (when I have a free day. Perhaps once this new baby turns 18?) I will paint the shelves white. And as Rosa and India get bigger, I’m sure they will have many many more things to fill up the rest of the space.

Unitl then, I have been enjoying the luxury of having more shelf-space than we actually need. Spreading stuff out a bit. Using one shelf for toys and gifts that would otherwise be crowded together. Turning my storage solution, effectively, into a temporary display.

Hurrah for shelves. Could one ever have too many?

Apologies for yet another planning post, rather than a ‘things I have actually done’ post. It is a sad fact of being very pregnant that there will probably be a bit more planning than doing going on here over the next few months. (Incidentally, my due date as expected has come and gone. Nope, no baby yet. Everyone has been very good at not asking me ‘ANY NEWS?’ so far, but I am prepared to start directing them to www.haveyouhadthatbabyyet.com very soon…)

I digress. You might remember that I was pondering some storage solutions for the front room, which I wrote about in my post here. My long-term plans are still to get fitted built-in furniture made in the alcoves. My medium-term plan is now to bite the bullet, and to get a Billy bookcase, with two accompanying DVD cases. I decided in the end that this means there will be too much dark wood across one wall, but that functionality was more important. The trip to Ikea will have to wait a bit. Not least because the more time elapses between our last trip and this one, the more stuff I mentally add to my list of things we need to buy there. (Not good. It’s possible I might end up stuck in this Ikea-limbo forever, perpetually adding things onto my ‘to buy’ list faster than we can save up the money to visit…)

The other thing I have been pondering is the ongoing issue of the crappy bookcase. I mentioned I had rather hoped to find an Ottoman with storage inside it, but I wasn’t having much luck finding the kind of thing I was after. Once again, John and Sherri of Young House Love were my inspiration, and I had started to fear that the kind of upholstered footstool come storage box that they glibly referred to might be an Americanism and not common over here. I lingered for a moment over the Hol storage table from Ikea. Which does have a lot to recommend it. Not least the price. But it’s almost identical in design to our washing bin upstairs, and this distracts me in a slightly upsetting way…

I was rather taken with some of the options over at made.com I haven’t yet bought anything from Made, but after adding their rather beautiful and bargainous large bow lamp to my imagined reworking of our bedroom, I feel it’s only a matter of time.

This Etienne upholstered storage bench is really rather beautiful. At £249, it’s significantly more money than the Ikea table. But also significantly more beautiful; I love the grey. And I can’t quite decide whether the material it’s made from had a velvet type pile or not. The page is not clear, but let’s say it has, because the thought pleases me. The hoarder in me, though, can’t help but look at those elegant legs and see only wasted space that could be storing things.Which brings me on to…

The Jeffrey. A big leathery, storage-rich bench with very little wasted space at the bottom. Sadly, gorgeous though this fella is, he is also £449, which is still tonnes of money, even though I am assured that his normal high street price would be £1345. He is also made of leather, which is a bit problematic for a vegetarian like me. Even one who still wears leather shoes, and becomes pescatarian whilst pregnant for the Omega 3 because she loves and misses it for brain development.

But lo! Just as I was despairing, through the door dropped a new catalogue from the people at loaf.com Somewhere I hadn’t come across before, and just as I was preparing to sling it into the bin, I lingered for a moment over their selection. And what should I find but a whole selection of ottomans. Glorious, roomy, lovely ottomans.

The Padma, for example, is nothing at all like what I’m looking for. But – look! Patchwork, embroidered material! The kind of piece of furniture that makes me desperate to go back to India. I am almost tempted to re-do the entire room to create a place where it would fit. And surely I could sell one of the children to raise the £495 it would cost? No? It’s political correctness gone made. Ah well.

This Mimosa ottoman would be much more the thing, in design at least it’s basically exactly what I was thinking of. Lovely clean lines, beautiful softly upholstered top, and lashings of storage inside.

Here is the problem, though. Where you see smooth, pale grey material, lovingly upholstered with hand-stitched Indian buttons, do you know what I see? I see an upturned sippy cup, gently and silently chugging its warm milk into an increasing puddle of damp. I see an abandoned apple core, softly decomposing into an indelible brown stain. I see the joyful unleashing of under 5s creativity that is carefree scribbles from felt-tip pens. In essence, I see a piece of furniture that is not  easily washable, and therefore very sadly currently has no place in my front room.

But just as I was sadly dismissing Loaf’s offerings as lovely but for the childless, I saw this one. The Indian dowry storage box. Everything about it is the manifestation of gorgeousness. Reader, I would marry it. I love it. I love the painted pattern: pleasingly geometric yet hand-done at the same time. I love the colour. I love the proportions. I particularly love the price, which is only £195. Again, more than Ikea’s offering. But many, many times more lovely.

It’s gone straight onto my ‘to buy’ list (which was looking so short and affordable, after all….. er…)  It might take a while, but this piece of furniture’s destiny involves not the heaps of quilts and saris that its name might suggest, but instead a life by my purple sofa, where it will be pressed into service holding magazines, jigsaw puzzles, and board games.

Notes
Pictures reproduced here by kind permission of made.com and loaf.com
This is not a sponsored post. I just love this stuff.