I am very excited to announce my first contribution to a magazine! I was asked by Anna, the new Editor of Homemade With Love magazine, to contribute my cotton reel holder tutorial and I have spent all of October as the ‘Guest Pinner’ for the magazine. For those of you who aren’t ‘pinners’ this means I have been finding images and tutorials of exciting handmade, craft and DIY home projects for the magazine’s Pinterest account. For those of you who are familiar with Pinterest, you will know this was just an excuse for me to spend more time pinning!

Now the month is over, I wanted to share some of the 100 home projects I have discovered in the process. The only problem is, I can’t decide which project to do first…

Mason jar lights by in.gredients.

Spray painted gold mugs by Garland of Grace.

Crocheted hangers by Dottie Angel.

Liberty print blankets on Purl Bee.

Handmade clay pots by Claire of Fellow Fellow for Say Yes to Hoboken blog.

Hand printing on fabric by Karen Barbe.

Decoupage bowl on the Liberty Craft blog.

Vintage yardstick hooks by Better Homes and Gardens.

Copper foiled mirror by Byf Ryd.

Toy boxes with castors by This Little Street.

Get crafting people! Homemade all the way.

Katy x

P.S Here’s a sneak peek of my article…

It’s that time of year when we all have to wrap up warm and brave the cold to watch pretty fireworks and drink lots of hot cider and eat sticky toffee apples.  To help give your garden some extra illumination try making these super simple paper lanterns…

You will need:

White paper bags – you can buy them here from Not On The High Street.

Hole-punch

Battery powered tea lights – you can buy them here.

All you need to do is use a hole-punch to create a design that’s very effective when illuminated. You can be much more ambitious and use a craft knife to create all sorts of designs.

Then place about four battery powered tea lights in each bag and you’re done (I told you it was as simple as can be). If it’s a windy night pop a few stones in the bag too to weigh them down even more.

I love the warm glow of these lanterns and they emit a lot of light too.

I hope you all have a lovely evening and happy birthday to my beauteous sister Juliette!

Katy x

It was my birthday recently and my boyfriend has got into a habit of buying me an ‘experience’ rather than ‘stuff’. This year, he arranged for me to go on a stained glass class, which I was very excited about because I LOVE stained glass, especially 1920’s-1940’s door and window panels (like the 1920’s one above that I bought for £18 in Southwold at a cute little antiques shop). My mum’s best friend, Jo, makes stained glass and I remember as a child seeing her creating and thinking it was all quite magical.

I went along to the class at Crafts Bee, which is a relatively new venture run by Karen. They teach lots of different crafts from stained glass to sewing and are based in South East London and Kent. I did the copper foil stained glass class, which is suitable for beginners and there were six of us in the class, so we got lots of individual attention.

I have never done any stained glass and I assumed that there would be no way of creating anything special by the end of the class, but I was wrong. In the six hours that I was there I was able to quickly learn the cutting glass technique, cut glass to complete a design and then learned how to copper foil and solder the design. By the end of the class I had made a beautiful panel that is now proudly hanging on my sitting room window.

This is how it happened…

Deciding the colours for the design.

Cutting the glass to fit the design.

Copper foiling each piece of glass.

Soldering the glass together – I was rubbish at this bit!

The finished piece. I love it.

I’m now thinking about buying some equipment so I can do it at home. I would really, really love to develop this craft and one day create a beautiful art deco style window panel.

Katy x

Happy Halloween everybody! I don’t know about you but some of my fondest childhood memories are of trick or treating with my sisters and kids from our neighbourhood. We’d get all dressed up and paint our faces and traipse round the streets stuffing our faces with as many sweets as is humanly possible.

I recently bought a box of Mason Ball jars (so expect a lot of posts about what you can do with them!) and I decided to try out something I’ve seen on a lot of American blogs. I’ve added a Halloween theme, just in case any of you are having a little party – this will work for both adults and kids alike.

You will need:

Mason Ball jars – I bought mine from an American site and even with the postage it was the cheapest that I could find. Buy Mason Ball Jars here.

1/4″ Grommets – buy grommets here.

Chalk board paint and chalk – buy paint here.

Straws – I bought Halloween themed ones from Pearl and Earl.

Toy spiders – I bought them here.

Drill with a metal drill bit

Pliers

 Tutorial:

1. Use the drill, with a metal drill bit, to make a hole through the centre of the lid.

2. Increase the size of the hole to 1/4″ by using a set of pliers to gently ease through the hole, making it bigger. The lid is very thin metal so this is very easy .

3. Spray the lids with the chalkboard paint and leave to dry for a couple of hours.

5. Use the pliers to help you ease the grommet around the hole in the lid. The sharp edges on the back of the lid will be covered by the grommet.

6. Write the names of your party-goers in chalk.

7. Pop a couple of the toy spiders in each cube of an ice tray and pour water over to create scary ice cubes!

8. Add your drink and then you can secure the lid with the outer ring (you can spray paint these too if you want to).

9. Pop your Halloween themed straws into each glass.

10. And you’re ready for your party – shame only my boyfriend and puppy are coming to mine 🙁

I can’t wait to make more of these for a summer garden party (oh for the return of those long summer days!). They’d be perfect for cocktails or pimms. Instead of spraying chalkboard paint, you could cover the lids in pretty paper or fabric.

Hope you have a good one (and more people come to your party than they did mine!) x

I am beyond excited to introduce my first guest post – and it’s for Liberty of London (click here for the full post)! The Liberty craft blog is brilliant, filled with ideas and inspiration, and I was asked me to create something with the Liberty Lifestyle collection of prints. As you all know, I’m a bit obsessed with Liberty print, so this was my absolute pleasure.

I chose two prints to make a travel seat that can be used when parents get stuck in a cafe or at a friend’s house without a highchair. It’s a super simple tutorial so anybody can make this in about an hour.

Check out the full tutorial on the Liberty craft blog! Woop!

Here’s little Heidi modelling my travel high chair.