A Mass of Odds and Ends

Many years ago I used to paint regularly, now I just do it on holiday. I found this little folding sketchbook in Venice a few years ago and have slowly filled it up with sketches, mostly drawn whilst waiting for yet another delicious platter of seafood to be placed in front of me. It is very nearly full, so I decided to try my hand at making my own. Its only flaw (to get a technical for a moment) is that the paper is just slightly too thin for my taste, so I bought a heavier gauge watercolour paper, and cut the entire sheet into rectangles, each one the size of two pages. Then I glued them together, interleaved, and sewed heavy canvas onto the front and the back.

It would work as a photograph album as well, with a photograph on each page. The finished product is bulkier than the original, but still small enough to fit in a pocket.

I love notebooks. The groaning shelves my study bear witness to this passion, and every now and then I try my hand at making one myself. This is my attempt at renewing my recipe book, a battered notebook with torn pages, liberally illustrated with splashes of wine and dabs of butter. There is lots of inspiration on the internet, I particularly like Erin Zamrzla’s work, you can see it here , and I love these notebooks made by Attic Journals. My solution is nowhere near as elegant - I took a clip file, covered it with newspaper and stuck some of my favourite recipes on the cover, then covered the whole thing with sticky-backed plastic.

For the pages I cut newspaper down to A4 size then stuck one recipe per page -that way I didn’t even have to rewrite any of the recipes. In the case of old recipe books that were falling apart I took the best recipes out and glued them onto pages as well.

On these cold dark winter days no one feels like going outside into the jungle of a garden to pick some fresh rosemary and sage, but I was getting fed up with the jam jar on the counter which frequently tipped its contents all over my chopping board just as I sliced bread for toast. All you need to make this is two small bottles (it helps if they are rectangular or square like these two), a piece of wire and a nail.

Wrap the wire tightly around the top of one bottle, leave about five or six centimetres between the bottles (you need to experiment to see how much the bottles tip towards each other, obviously you don’t want them to do so too much otherwise the water begins to pour out) then wrap it around the second bottle. When you hang them on the nail they naturally tip towards each other.

This has been my guide to preparing the house for the winter months, against the time when the mountain of clutter  indoors threatens to engulf us. Published by Thames and Hudson, ReadyMade offers to “solve problems, cure dizzy spells and hold open the door”. Our first project, inspired by its “garden-shed” approach is the family black board

which is also a key-cupboard

made out of one of our original windows. With just another six windows knocking around the barn outside there is scope for lots more of this sort of thing, which may explain Aldo’s balsamic vinegar project, which keeps him a little too busy to go around attaching old windows to the wall…