I wanted to show you this great piece on my home that’s just gone live with Design Sponge. Thanks so much to Keiko for taking such glamorous pictures!
Comments (1) Tags: books, colour, garden, homemade, interiors, Simple, thrifty decoration, white rooms
An advance copy of my new book has just arrived and here are a few sample pages for you to look at! It is packed with simple seasonal ideas for home cooking and living, from a spring feast to Christmas treats. For me a good meal is as much about where it is eaten as what is on the plate, so every recipe suits an occasion. In the summer chapter, for example, there’s easy tortilla for a picnic, spicy chicken piri piri for a barbeque, holiday inspired Portuguese fish and potato soup, and lemon ice cream for a long hot afternoon.
Also just posted is my latest utube which shows you how to make the delicious pan con tomate as seen above on the cover!
I love to eat asparagus and purple sprouting broccoli in spring, and it tastes even better with some homemade hollandaise.
My mum taught me how to bake cakes and biscuits. Shortbread is one of my favourites and really really easy to make.
As you know, I have a vegetable patch and grow simple things such as climbing beans, and radishes which are brilliant to dip in salt and eat with other summer salad treats.
Comments (10) Tags: books, home cooking, homemade, Simple
Horrors! My weekly post is almost thwarted when I discover that my big green canvas sewing bag with the chair cover I want to tell you how to make is missing. I stomp up and down the stairs looking in every unlikely place because the shoots move my life randomly from room to room and sometimes forget to put it back again!
A call is put out and I find it has accidentally been picked up with another stylist’s props. After a flurry of texts the bag arrives safe and sound before the clock strikes midnight. The lost property thing works, too, the other way round in terms of the stuff accidentally left here: lens caps, jackets, I-phones, address books and once, a priceless bracelet dropped in the dog’s basket.
Having also removed the furry obstacle it’s back to the subject of how to sew a simple linen tea towel cover, a kind of apron for any basic kitchen chair.
MATERIALS 1 tea towel measuring 85x60cm, 2 metres white ribbon or cotton tape, white cotton thread.
Firstly (see above) , cut two 10cm slits in the tea towel where the cover will bend up from the seat to the chair back. Turn back and stitch narrow hems on the raw edges of the slits .
Press a 5cm turnover to the wrong side and to the first slit, on both sides of the tea towel.
Fold the ribbon in half and attach it to the centre of the top of the tea towel. Press over 5cm along the top of the tea towel (see above).
Stitch the top turn over to the first turn over on each side of the tea towel (see above) but don’t stitch through the front.
To carry the ribbon ties cut an opening through the turned over sides (see above) on each side of the towel towel and stitch button hole style, about 2.5cm wide. Pull the ribbon through on both sides.
Tie the cover on to the chair and use!
It’s been a whirlwind of a week in location house land: the walls are purple one minute, then lavished with paper in stylish patterns, the next. And that’s not including the 15 people who organise the Queen of Craft’s natty cushions and heart shaped jam tarts.
It’s good to get out of the way of drying paint and have the first hits of the season on the tennis court. I like Fabian the coach because he says lots of ‘well dones’ unlike the slightly tutting new accountant who I meet to discuss the bulging packets of receipts.
The air is marzipan-and-lemon-scented. Spring has gone into overdrive in the last few days, and the white beads on the apple tree might blossom too early if this luscious warmth continues. Gardeners are always paranoid about the risk of frost at this time of year, but I for one, can only luxuriate in and enjoy the myriad hues of blue in skies that have been leaden for too long.
As well as enjoying the bundles of grape hyacinths (see last week) I walk the dog through glades of delicate blue Scillas (above, and another cousin of the hyacinth family) that is so much a part of spring. I’m a blue girl as much as a green one when it comes to having splashes of the colour around the house. I love old faded blue and white floral china (above) it looks great against white walls. Coastal blue and white Cornishware stripes are always smart. I buy it both new, and secondhand when I can find it at a good price.
Readers of my books can’t fail to notice my passion for blue and white checks. I think small check patterns are easier on the eye for accessories such as cushions and pillow cases. See an example here on the new Swedish style bed from Feather and Black. This is the one that replaced the vast low slung circular Ikea number that was great for 12 year olds on sleepovers, but hopeless for arthriticky relatives.
PS. No thanks, I don’t want any more royal wedding paraphenalia in my inbox: “A bed that is fit for a Queen, King sofa and Queen armchair’, or, believe it or not ‘Knit Your Own Royal Wedding’ etc etc. But I don’t mind reading the low down on clever Emily Chalmers of Caravan whose new book, Modern Vintage Style, is out soon.
Comments (2) Tags: colour, homemade, interiors, scent, thrifty decoration
Ha Ha! I am right on trend in my several-seasons-old canary yellow buttoned J Crew cardigan, as the March issue of Vogue proclaims ‘fashion’s new love for colour’. Of course we all know it’s not really new, as fashion is all about an ongoing passion with colour in some form or other. But there is something particularly resonant about the newness and vibrancy that Spring brings to everything. A sense, too, of optimism and possibilities – from the leggy amaryllis by my kitchen window (see above) about to unfurl in a whirl of striped pink and white petals, to the Spring pages of fashion mags washed in bright shades of tangerine, raspberry and quince. (I look forward to the first swim of the season at the lido and have my eye on a hyacinth blue retro spot halterneck swimsuit in the Boden catalogue that plopped through my letter box last week.)
When I haven’t seen my children for a while and we meet after a fortnight away or longer, there’s a sense of seeing them as new people, almost like getting to know them all over again. That’s how I feel, in a way, when I hold the neatly bound sections of the new book, all ready to be sent off to the printers in China. Is it really three months since I turned in the final acknowledgements? I am excited, because I now see the book with a fresh eye. It’s not tiring to scan the spreads that I checked over and over during the editing process. I hope it doesn’t sound puffed up to say it’s looking good!
Feeling buoyant I am inspired to revisit a piece of half finished patchwork that has been lying in my large turquoise canvas remnants bag for the last year or so. It’s made up of blue and white pieces cut from various sources: pairs of worn out children’s pyjamas and tattered jeans. There’s also a bit of floral Liberty print from a dress that I cut up because I grew tired of its shape. (Although quite expensive, I also like the idea of pre cut Liberty patchwork squares sold by the bundle.)
Foot on the accelerator I motor along on the rather battered Elna Lotus SP that my parents gave me for my 21st birthday. The process of pinning and stitching, trying to steer not only a straight path but also fingers away from the dagger effects of the speeding needle, are all good for freeing the mind of muddle. As good as digging the garden, or beating egg whites to frothy peaks.
Once everything is sewn together I hem the edges of what is to become a kind of patchwork loose cover for the seat of the chesterfield. I say, loose, because the dog, and the cat, are very fond of this surface, and it would soon look very sad, very quickly if I couldn’t whip it off to be washed and revived.
NB Must catch the British photographer E.O. Hoppe’s modernistic portraits (Vita Sackville West, John Masefield) at The National Portrait Gallery.
NNB I made pheasant and pea (frozen petit pois are delicious) risotto last night, with the leftovers and home made stock from a brace of pheasants from the Farmer’s market. It’s good not to have to be a hunting shooting fishing type in order to enjoy the mildly gamey flavour, and lean texture of these inexpensive birds.
This feels like spring. A brilliant sunlight filled day and a plate of Daisy’s eau de nil and chalk white eggs fresh from her hens. I check outside and even the bare flower beds have little patches of brilliant green where the chives, and tulips are having a go at bursting forth. I know that the doom mongers say there’s plenty more foul wintry weather to come, but you can’t ignore the fact that it stays light until teatime. And as it turns dusky velvet blue, the sky has the luminous feel associated with softer, warmer and longer days ahead.
I like to bring the spring feeling inside even if it hasn’t quite got going outside. There are inexpensive bundles of daffodils, or pots of delicate grape hyacinths at Jayne Copperthwaite’s fragrant flower shop which she recently opened in Balham, south London. It’s my daughter’s 17th birthday weekend and so there’s every excuse to come away laden with bunches of blue hyacinths and sweetly scented white narcissi.
I prefer my flowers to sit in containers that don’t shout: simple glass vases, pint beer gasses even, or the white enamel bowls that I fill with bulbs and layer with moss.
I lay the table with a suitably spring green cotton cloth made out of a furnishing fabric remnant from my store cupboard on the landing. Later at the birthday dinner, there are candles, pink fizz and large slices of chocolate cake. (I feel very short amongst the beautiful gazelles in high heels.)
NB: Before I push Publish, I must say how really cross I am that the Government wants to close hundreds of libraries (481 libraries, 422 buildings and 59 mobile libraries are under threat according to Public Libraries News).
As an 8 year old, it was a first taste of independence, wheeling my bike back from Earlsfield library with an Everlasting Toffee strip and a bagful of books dangling from the handlebars. The shiny parquet floors and hushed atmosphere made the library seem all at once very grow up but somehow calm and comforting. Choosing books from packed shelves, rows and rows, was like being in a kind of sweet shop of words and ideas, and all the better because you could take them home for free.
My current local library at West Norwood is a brilliant source of everything from thrillers, to the latest Booker Prize winner in a pristine dust jacket. There are mothers with young children getting their first taste of reading books, old people who come to read the newspapers, seek some companionship. Even the disruptive teenagers calm down in this airy, peaceful environment. And in common with other libraries around the county, it is also a lifeline for the one in five people who do not have the internet at home and need their local library to look for jobs.
The libraries must stay open.
If I think too hard about writing I can’t write, and similarly at the Zumba Latin beat dance class I part company with the group rhythm when I concentrate too hard on getting arms, legs, and body to co-ordinate. When I relax and let the beat take over I may not look like an extra from Dirty Dancing, but boy do I feel like it. Shaking one’s booty is a good way to dissipate the stress after talking with Pete from Thames Water who calls to let me know, a touch triumphantly perhaps?, that I still have a leaking water pipe. In as even a tone as I can muster, (Pete has the mildly pompous and intimidating air of a customs official so it is hard not to feel ruffled) I say I’ve spent nearly £1,000 for 20 metres of shiny blue plastic pipe, (and a mud strewn garden) to rectify the problem.
The workman returns and confirms a miniscule drip where the new pipe meets the stopcock. I call Pete who says he’s going to send out another engineer, to test the repaired repair. What happens, I wonder, if our water’s running when he does his secret testing by the front gate? Won’t this show up as leakage? Thames Water, you see, don’t seem to Do appointments and check with the householder that their water supply is actually turned off……..
Not all is utterly frustrating. My successful domestic repairs are a replacement tile, cut perfectly to size by Adorn Tiling, for our Victorian tiled hall floor. And my daughter’s Spanish riding boots, battered more by life on campus than anything horsey, which have been given a completely new lease of life with a new stitched sole and heels thanks to our local branch of Timpsons.
Happily it’s time to bake a cake for my son’s birthday. I use my default Victoria sponge recipe of equal parts of self-raising flour, (some of the flour substituted with cocoa powder), caster sugar, eggs and butter.) I use an electric hand mixer for the sugar, butter and eggs, and then fold in the flour with a metal tablespoon for lightness. When the mixture is a gloopy paste I dollop it into three well greased round sandwich tins.
After half an hour or so I turn out the steaming and springy cakes and leave them to cool on my mum’s wobbly pre war metal rack. I make chocolate butter icing – after sifting the icing sugar and combining it with sifted cocoa powder and softened unsalted butter. I add a little water and beat it with a fork to make it light and fluffy. I use a palette knife to smooth it over the cake. And then decorate it with silver balls.
(NB Check out my definitive recipe for a good cake in my forthcoming new book.)
Nature is inspiring a kind of natural decoration guru all of her own. The cabbage is a case in point, all beautiful glowing green and purple frilling leaves – the chicest interior decorator couldn’t do better. If you want your cabbage to retain its colour and texture remember to steam it lightly and only for a few minutes.
I hope to be buying my cabbages and other fresh-from-the-farm veg at our proposed new street market in West Norwood, which is following hard on the heels of the fabulous Sunday morning farmers market in Brixton. This is an uplifting project and positive stuff when all the papers are saturated with comment and data about Britain’s increasing irrelevance on the world stage. I think about the future for my children. Eerily, these stories echo those that framed my teenage world – one in five young people unemployed, and lives strained to breaking point by shrinking state support – in the national decline that so gripped 1970s and early 1980’s Britain.
Comments (5) Tags: books, colour, get crafty, home cooking, homemade, interiors, Simple, winter
When people ask, how do you know what to chose when you’re putting together a new room or buying a piece of furniture ? I say that going with my instinct of what feels and looks right is usually successful. This is all very well, but if I am fussing or thinking about something else I may not always be properly alert to some wonderful new prospect that is staring me in the face.
This is exactly what happens when I am cruising around the Brixton branch of the British Heart Foundation’s chain of second-hand furniture and electrical shops. There it is, a magnificent upright and elegant wing chair. A touch elderly-aunt-like in its plush velvet cover but this can soon be sorted out with an update in a simple blue and white ticking. And my goodness it’s only 20 quid.
I clock it as ‘brilliant, should buy it, a great piece for the location house’ but the detail is all made foggier in the domestic thought jumble. I am oblivious to precious minutes being lost as I fiddle with the messages on my iPhone. Too late! An eagle eyed young mum with child and a buggy also knows its potential value and snaps it up before I’ve even had the chance to press back to Menu.
You win some, you lose some.
Happily, I return to form when I spot a pair of pretty armchairs (see above and below) lined up on the pavement outside the junk shop in Streatham Hill. Like the lost wing chair, they have promise in spite of unappealing covers. A quick barter with the fag-in- hand, peroxide blonde attendant and the chairs are mine for under 40.00. Their new home is the blue room where I think I have made them look a little more dashing with linen shawls from Volga linens. I find the use of a throw is a very handy trick to cover up ugly prints or threadbare seats, and to protect a more precious fabric from muddy paws or children’s feet.
Also related to a too fast, too multi-tasking existence (as seen with wing chair experience above) I read in the newspaper that the emphasis on knowledge in our culture, is taking us further away from using our hands. Too right. I think it’s so important to feel the physicality and satisfaction of creating something oneself. My main proviso is that nothing should be too complicated. One of the best ways, for example, to update a simple dining chair, is to give it a lick of paint. (For those who are like my friend Marjorie and think that being handy is an anathema, look at Howe London to see some clever ways with old-fashioned Windsor chairs.) My favourite colours for sprucing old chairs are duck egg blues or plain whites.
This is how you do it: Sand the chair with a medium grain sand paper, and then again with a fine one. Remove all loose bits of old varnish or flakes of old paint to leave a smooth surface. Apply one coat of wood-primer or undercoat as evenly as possible. Allow to dry. Apply one layer of eggshell paint. Allow to dry thoroughly before applying a second coat of paint.
I also love the idea of rescuing worn out linen and blankets with the needles and thread from my desktop sewing kit. It’s a wonderful and practical distraction from the screen to repair a favourite blue and white check blanket that has lost some of its blanket stitch edging. (You can see lots more simple sewing examples in my book Sew Easy). It feels productive, and calms me. Just as an afternoon digging in the garden does, or stirring the aromatic golden marmalade which is on the list for this weekend.
Oh yes, one other good thing is that although the garden has been left looking like a rugby pitch on a wet Saturday afternoon, the leak is mended and I no longer live in fear of Thames Water spying on our pipes in the early hours.
I squelch around the soggy garden mentally choosing new planting ideas for spring. Smooth red rosehips and little purple figs, relics of last summer, on the tree in a frost-cracked pot are just about the only other colours in a palette of greens and earth browns.
In the long, low illuminating rays of a sunny winter’s afternoon it is clear that the house is in need of a good scrub. My tools are thick gloves, bucket of hot water, mild detergent, a good wooden scrubbing brush and elbow grease. With the Radio 4 play for company it’s not too long before the white floorboards look less dingy and the bare pine boards in the kitchen feel smoother, and cleaner underfoot.
I would not describe myself as house-proud – always fussing and tweaking the cushions in a Stepford Wives kind of way. But I do feel a certain self-consciousness on behalf of my home in its role as a location house – like the protective mother of a willowy model daughter at the mercy of fickle art directors. The other day, it was turned down because our beds were too ‘European’. I would be the wrong person for the job if I took this as a personal insult. All it means is that the space isn’t right for that particular job. Getting the detail up to scratch is all-important. I overhear a comment about a client’s visit to a location, that was so shabby chic, the door handles were stuck on with sellotape. Feeling slightly like a child about to be caught in the act, I make a note to remedy our interior malfunctions.
Preparation for photography means an enormous session with the washing machine. I love the dog and cat but not their muddy paws that decorate the white cotton sheets and covers as soon as I’ve made up fresh beds. So I am very strict and un-dog-and-cat-lover-like and banish them from the bedrooms until a shoot is over.
All of the folding, ironing, and hot water and bucket work is not in vain, when the first client of the year announces that they would like to come and live here.
When the thigh-high reflective waders are pulled out I know the ongoing water leak situation is not so rosy. Soon the front garden is looking like a floodlit crime scene from a Henning Menkell thriller as Carl the plumber digs down in search of an elusive and broken water pipe. Neighbours pass by and look pityingly at our muddy excavations. Several more holes and mounds of earth later, the verdict is a whole run of replacement tubing and great expense.
At least larder supplies are stable as the older two have returned to university. And I am no longer burning my fortune away in gas after discovering that the house was unbearably hot not because of the wonderful capabilities of the new boiler, which of course are undeniable, but because the thermostat had been turned up to 75C in order to quick dry a load of washing over radiators before the return to penniless student life.
In between everything domestic, I am back at my desk writing Christmas thank yous with beautiful black and white cards – photographs of long gone North Devon rural life by James Ravilious from the Beaford Archive. (I must also tell you about the inspiring pictures on show at the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize at the National Portrait Gallery.) With many more evenings, and afternoons, of electric light before the clocks change, I am thinking of trying out what must be the first, and only stylish looking low energy light bulb: the Plumen bulb uses 80% less energy and lasts 8 times longer than incandescent bulbs.
Meanwhile, it is good to see spring is advancing with my indoor pots of sprouting amaryllis and hyacinth bulbs.
From almost-hysterical queues to silhouettes of trees and church towers against white fields: this contrast from urban shopping frenzy to rural peace has been one of the best things about our Christmas, spent in the depths of Somerset. Charades, a melee of dogs plopped in front of the fire, and Blackadder on the TV are pretty good festive ingredients, too.
There’s a feeling of relief that all the present searching and sorting is over. I am using the post Christmas calm to get stuck in to Before I Go To Sleep With a bizarre form of memory loss as its key theme, the story is a gripping psychological thriller which kept me up all night, because it was too tantalising to close the pages and not get to the clever ending.
But enough of the adrenaline. I am thrilled with my copy of Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education by Michael Pollen who brilliantly promotes the garden rather than the wild as the most appropriate place for rethinking our relationship with nature. He says that a garden is the place for being in, rather than looking at. Lawns, for example are not part of Pollen’s landscape: “The more serious about gardening I became, the more dubious lawns seemed” he writes and goes on to say “For however democratic a lawn may be with respect to one’s neighbours, with respect to nature it is authoritarian”. I know what he means, but you do have to tough it with nature too – I’m thinking of the groundelder and lemon balm that engulfs my summer garden, of which I have no qualms at hacking down to maintain order.
With more musing on my unseasonal train of thought I do so miss the summer herby lavender scents of my garden which is looking so spare and flattened now that there is a bit of a thaw in progress. The closest I can seem to get to a summer sensory experience at the moment is the gorgeous Primrose Facial Hydrating Cream with lavender, sage and rosemary from Aesop. I don’t usually find huge words of praise for beauty treatments (having worked as a beauty editor some years ago and tried out products that came with extraordinary claims, even more extraordinary prices and yet didn’t seem to be any better than E45 cream from the chemist) but this cream is delicious in fragrance and good to my frazzled winter skin.
Whilst I’m on the subject of beautifying I shall keep you posted with the effects, if any, (who me, sounding a touch cynical?) of my Yuroll which bills itself as a jade facial massager – not unlike a small rolling pin on a long handle – and is supposed to ensure a “lean re-contoured wonderfully unlined face: thoroughly toned and with improved elasticity”. I can’t see anything, apart from a very large dose of Botox improving my ‘laughter’ lines and general wear and tear, much of which occurred when I sunbathed furiously in my teens. But, hey I’m going to give it a go!
We’re all nursing extremely full stomachs, and yearning for something lighter and more fragrant than Christmas turkey fare. My sister in law gave me a jar of her preserved lemons, which I can’t wait to add to a spicy tagine with some fluffy hot couscous. I must also pay a visit to Persepolis our local taste of Persia in Peckham, where there are many aromatic middle eastern delights.
After an extremely bracing walk across Hampstead Heath, it won’t be over indulgent in this season of indulgency, to enjoy some ice cream at Marine Ices in Camden, a family tradition that goes back to when my children were small and seemed to disappear behind their two huge scoops of chocolate tottering on wafer cones.
Comments (0) Tags: books, Christmas, colour, flower power, garden, home cooking, homemade, scent, Simple, winter
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Jane Cumberbatch
