Vintage Style Greetings Cards

Hello friend!

I hope you had a great weekend. Mine was pretty busy since it was my Dad's birthday, but we had such a lovely time. It was great to spend time with my family, it was one of the best weekends I've had for ages.

This photo is the birthday card I gave my Dad. I wanted to share this little idea for making your own greetings cards from postcards. It isn't really a tutorial, just a suggestion. I had a lot of vintage postcards left over after our wedding (I'll have to tell you more about that some time!). I really wanted to use them, but lots of them were already written. I simply bought some card blanks and these lovely old fashioned self-adhesive photo corners (which I got from Paperchase) so that I could turn the postcards into greetings cards. I love the fact that you can still remove the postcard and read the message on the back, and the person who receives the card can even reuse the postcard.

I used these vintage postcards, which I bought quite cheaply on Ebay, since I already had them, but there is no reason why you couldn't use new postcards as well, or your own photos. I just love the poems and mottos you get on old postcards, like this one, with its wish that your birthday is "right royal"!

This is such an easy way to make unique handmade cards, give it a go!

Make Lemon Squash with Lemongrass

Happy Monday!  Do you remember I posted a picture recently of all those lemons I bought at the market? Well, I finally got round to doing something with them! I used a recipe from the River Cottage Preserves Handbook for Lemon Squash, which is especially perfect since we have been having some really lovely sunny warm weather here lately.

Since we had a stick of lemongrass in the freezer I thought I would add this for a fragrant twist (you can never buy a single stalk of lemongrass so I always end up freezing the rest of a pack when we cook Thai curries). I was inspired by Belvoir's delicious lime and lemongrass cordial, which you can buy in the supermarket here in the UK. We drank a lot of this Belvoir cordial on our honeymoon in Dorset a couple of years ago, especially as a cocktail with sparkling water, ice and gin! The taste always reminds me of sunny, lazy summer afternoons in the garden with a drink, a book and a blanket, and it is this that I wanted to recreate.

So here's the recipe:

• 7-10 lemons (I think I used the full 10)
• 650g granulated sugar
• 1 stick of lemongrass (or whatever extra flavouring you would like - I think root ginger would work really well here as well)
• water

As explained above, you pare the zest of four of your lemons and set it aside. I used a vegetable peeler because I don't have a special citrus parer, which would create fine shreds (you might have see the type of thing, a small tool with a row of little holes at the end).

You put the lemons in a pot of boiling water for one minute, which flavours the water and makes the lemons yield more juice. I also put my lemongrass stalk in the water with the lemons too. Take the lemons out and squeeze them once they are cool enough to handle. You need to keep going until you get 500ml of lemon juice, which in my case meant adding another lemon's worth of juice, but it will all depend on the size of your lemons.

Put the lemon zest and sugar in a pan with 500ml of the water you boiled the lemons in, and bring this to the boil. When it is just boiling, take it off the heat for a minute and add the lemon juice. Put it back on the heat and bring it back up just to the boil. Then you just have to strain it through a sieve and pour it into sterilised bottles while the bottles are still hot (here are Delia Smith's instructions on how to sterilise bottles and jars - along with a recipe for strawberry jam!).

PS. Another new font I downloaded for this post! I really like this handwriting font, appropriately named Sunshine in My Soul, which I downloaded from Dafont.
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A 60th Birthday Surprise

Hello! We made it, another weekend has come round, phew! I hope you've had a great week this week, and you've been busy with interesting things.

This week I have been working really hard on a special project my sisters and I have been working on for our Dad's 60th birthday next week. We are making him a photo book based around music, which has always been one of his greatest loves in life. As long as I can remember my Dad made compilation tapes, for each year's family holiday, for weddings, for birthdays, for each of us girls whenever we went away by ourselves. We asked his friends and family to send us photos of them and dad, and to pick a song that reminds them of him. They also sent us a message to include.

My youngest sister, Rosie, has been responsible for dealing with all the correspondence, and then this last week I have been laying out the book pages, adding extra images and song lyrics. Its been a great project to work on, reading all the wonderful messages for my lovely Dad and seeing all the old photos. As always I should really have started work on it earlier, and I wanted to get it ordered by Friday so it would get here in time (hopefully) so the last few days have been a bit stressful trying to get it done while not neglecting my baby too much! 

I'm so pleased with how it looks and I know it will all be worth it to see his reaction to the book this time next weekend - its so exciting! We are also making a compilation CD of all the tracks that people have chosen and that will be added to the book too. I thought I would also add a CD with all the digital photos that we've used in the book, since there are some that Dad doesn't have. On the last page I added these lyrics from "The End" by The Beatles, his favourite band. I thought this was a great sentiment to sum up the spirit of the whole book, which is just bursting with a lifetime of love and friendship. I hope in another 30 years I will be as well loved and highly regarded as my Dad.

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PS. I got most of the extra images I used on this project from Fuzzimo, an absolute treasure trove of free digital resources.

Making Sloe Gin Out of Season

Normally making sloe gin would be an autumn/winter activity, often made just in time for Christmas presents. But we picked so many sloes last autumn that we couldn't afford to buy enough gin for all of them! So we stashed what we had left in the freezer and pretty much forgot about them until this week when we came to defrost it. So this week I ended up making spring sloe gin! It is a simple assembly job really, and sloe gin is a big favourite of mine so I like to make as much as possible when we can get sloes.

We gathered our sloes in the woods nearby where we live. Once you know what you're looking for you'll find that sloe bushes are all over the place in the woodlands and hedges here in the UK. Here is a handy online guide to recognising wild sloes, along with rosehips and blackberries.

My recipe for sloe gin comes from one of my absolute favourite and most used recipe books, The River Cottage Preserves Handbook. You will need 450g sloes, 450g granulated sugar and 600ml gin (it can be the cheap stuff!). Traditionally you are meant to prick all the sloes individually, but for reasons I don't completely understand, instead of doing this you can simply freeze them, which has the same effect. You then mix your sloes, gin and sugar in a large clean jar and put it somewhere cool and dark. Give it a shake every now and then to make sure the sugar dissolves.

Most recipes say that you should strain it to remove the sloes and rebottle the gin after a month or so. I must say, with our last batch of sloe gin, we left it all in the jar, sloes and all, for about a year, and never removed them except to serve, and it was really great. I was amazed how much better it was than shop bought sloe gin, plus it is cheap and easy to make and a good excuse for a walk in the woods. And since you can freeze sloes, you can pretty much make it whenever funds allow you to buy the gin!

I'll have to post some of my favourite sloe gin based drinks once we break open this lot later in the year. Happy preserving - and drinking!


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My Wonderful Wedding Quilt

There were so many things I loved about my wedding day but none more than the amazing wedding quilt that my wonderful friends and family. This was a secret project that I knew nothing about until we were presented with the quilt after cutting our wedding cake. I wanted to share it with you partly just because it is so incredible - this is definitely one of those "things you would save in a fire" items - but also because I thought it might inspire others of you to do a similar project for someone you love. It is a great wedding gift, but could also work for a new baby gift, a birthday gift for a landmark birthday, or an anniversary present. We worked together to make another quilt last year for my little sister's wedding, so I came to learn more about the work involved from the other side of the project last summer!

The wedding quilt project was masterminded by Martha, one of my oldest and best friends in the world. Together with my sisters and both of our mums, they emailed all my girlfriends, female relatives and future in-laws and asked who would like to be involved. Everyone who wanted to contribute was given a basic format to follow, which ensures there is some consistency in the overall design. They were told a set size for the square pieces, given this pattern of light, medium and dark fabrics to follow and asked to add a personal design in the centre. The good thing is that each individual square is small and light enough to be easy to post, so people who live far away or even overseas, can take part if they want.

The centre designs of each square are so personal to us, and reference things from the history of my relationships with the person who made each square: my friend Sarah put tea and cake on her square as a reminder of the many times we have been for afternoon tea together, while my Mum embroidered the lyrics to one of the songs she sang to me and my sisters when we were little ("You are my honey, honeysuckle/ I am the bee"). My mother-in-law and sister-in-law featured a beautiful cross stitch design from one of the seed packets sold by their family company - fittingly, Hearts' Ease - while my sister's friend did a fantastic square featuring the binary solo from Flight of the Conchords song "The Humans Are Dead". Each one was completely different and totally personal to us.

Once all the individual squares were collected, they had to be assembled into a quilt top. A single fabric was used in between all the squares, which again brings together the different designs. You then have to add backing, edging and sandwich a layer of padding in between. All these pieces are sandwiched together and tacked together to hold all the layers of the sandwich together. The edging and piecing together is done with a sewing machine, but then all the quilting was done by hand. You can do as much or as little hand quilting as you can bear, or you can do it by machine if you are confident with a sewing machine, but bear in mind that the quilt will be enormous (ours in the size of our king size bad) and heavy, so it will potentially be hard to manipulate when using a sewing machine.

One of the most wonderful things about this quilt to me is the many hours of work that went into making it. The time, thought and effort it obviously took to make this precious heirloom are what give it its value to me. It is incredibly moving to look at it and think of the love that went into it. We have it on our bed every day so I see it all the time and it is part of the fabric of our every day lives. I love the idea that one day I will hand it down the family, along with the stories behind each square.

Having worked on another wedding quilt myself, I can say that it is also a really fulfilling thing to do for someone special, and there are such happy times to be had sitting with a group of other women (or men) of several generations, friends and family, all working on hand stitching a quilt like this. It feels solid and old fashioned and symbolic to work on something like this, knowing how much meaning it will carry. We will treasure our wedding quilt forever.

Have you worked on a collaborative wedding project before? What did you make? And what special wedding gifts have you been given?


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A trip to the market and a sweet treat

Last Wednesday we visited my parents in St Albans. I try to go on Wednesdays or Saturdays because those are the market days in St Albans. I love a shopping trip to the market and I've found it's the best place to buy fruit and veg, herbs and spices, flowers, fabric, eggs, fresh fish, all sorts of things... Today I bought some vanilla pods and used them to make vanilla sugar to use in cakes and custards. I thought I'd share it with you in case you fancy a little domestic dabbling, or need a last minute homemade gift for any bakers you know!

That's it: sugar, jar, vanilla, done! It is so simple I don't think you can really call it a recipe. The longer you leave it the more the vanilla flavour will infuse, so I am going to put mine in the cupboard for a while to mature. And the best thing is, apparently you can take the pods out, infuse them in liquid (for example when warming milk for custards and sauces - or wouldn't that make the best hot chocolate?) and afterwards you can take them out, wash them and return them to the jar.

 You can make all sorts of other flavoured sugars, like lavender or lemon - I might try a few more experiments... I'm so excited to try my vanilla sugar out - maybe in baby Joe's birthday cake. I hope you enjoy this little mini project. Do you have a great street market near you that you like to shop at? Or maybe you even have your own stall?

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Monday Make: Dry Wipe Boards Two Ways

Hi there,

I hope you had a great weekend. I did lots of planning and organising for developing this blog, though I don't want to give away all my plans just yet!

Today I have finally got round to a project I have been wanting to do for ages. I saw this idea to use frames to make dry wipe boards for your home on Pinterest last year. I don't know who originally came up with this idea, and I don't claim it as my own. It was one of those ideas that seems so obvious once you see it, it makes you wonder how you didn't come up with it yourself.

Basically, the principle is that the glass (or perspex) of the frame is a wipe clean surface that you can write on with a white board marker. You can then customise this with any kind of paper, photographs or fabric you can think of. Easy! I have made two frames for my home today, which took about half an hour for both. It is cheap, easy and totally customisible - what's not to love? I went for two contrasting looks, just to show how versatile this project is. 

The first one I made using a beautiful piece of fancy edged vintage linen that I bought in a bundle with a load of doileys, hankies and other treasures from a charity shop down in Somerset. I picked this one because it happened to fit my frame (a cheap one from Wilkinson) perfectly, which I took as a sign! I like that with this one the fabric isn't pressed completely flat so you can still see the texture and creases and I love the gentle, neutral colour palette and simplicity of the design. This would work well with all kinds of textiles from bright prints to lace to those lovely vintage hand embroidered hankies and napkins you often find in charity shops.

The second one I made used another cheap frame, this one from Ikea, and used a piece of Orla Kiely wrapping paper I got from John Lewis today. In fact, I think the paper probably cost more than the frame! I simply cut the paper to size and put it in the frame, done! This is a much more modern, graphic style, and I think it looks really great, and much more expensive than it actually was. I think in total both these dry wipe boards cost me less than £10.

I am thrilled with how this project has come out, both boards look great in my home and will be really useful as well as beautiful. Most people probably have a frame and a bit of nice wrapping paper, leftover wallpaper or fabric at home already, so this is the kind of quick project that you could easily accomplish in an evening. The great thing is that you can change them as often as you like and customise them to match or contrast with any colour scheme. These would be a great homemade gift since they work for meal planners, shopping lists, to do lists or just leaving your sweetheart little notes before you go out... Enjoy making your own customised dry wipe board at home and combining home organisation with prettiness!

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Monday Make: Magnetic mustard!

Hi, did you have a great weekend? I hope so. Ours was good but mega-busy, my in-laws were up for a seed sale at Waddesdon Manor (my father-in-law has his own business as a heritage seed merchant, and Mr Cardigan works for the family company too. If you or someone you know is a gardener then check them out online and on Twitter). The weather was terrible on Saturday but beautiful on Sunday, ideal for getting outside and walking with the buggy in the lovely grounds of Waddesdon.

I wanted to share with you this quick little make that I did over the weekend. I love some of the classic designs that are still used in food packaging here in the UK. Some of them have barely changed from the Victorian originals. However, Mr Cardigan tends to get a little annoyed at the number of golden syrup tins and the like that clutter out home, so I am always on the lookout for ways to put my hoard to good use in the home. Useful and beautiful, that's the dream!

What you'll need.

All I did was to super glue these little magnets onto one side of this empty Coleman's Mustard Powder tin, wait for the glue to dry and voila! A handy magnetic container for your fridge or (in my case) boiler. I have used mine to store drawing pins for the pin board opposite, but it would also be a great place to keep a pen to go with my shopping list here.

The great thing is that you can use different sized tins (and more magnets and glue) depending on what you want to store. I have a beautiful Spanish paprika tin that I'm going to do this with, and it would also be great with those larger decorative tins of olive oil you can buy. This project really couldn't be simpler, quicker or cheaper to do, so do have a go yourself!

This said, I made a couple of mistakes which you can avoid... The main thing that I did wrong was to stick the magnets on the wrong way round (dur!). Only one side is magnetic so do check that the magnetic side is facing out before you glue them. If, like me, you stick the wrong side, I simply prised them off with a knife - be careful! - and glued them back the other way round. Since you don't see the magnet side it doesn't actually matter if the tin is chipped, its just a pain to change them. I also didn't put enough magnets to the back to start with, so the weight of the drawing pins meant the tin slid down the front of the boiler. Again, this is easy to fix, just stick on some more magnets until it holds in place!

I hope this little make inspires you to get sticking this week!


PS. I love this shopping list pad, we are now on our second. There is also a meal planner pad too which between them go a long way to helping me keep organised. Both are by Knock Knock and are available to buy on Amazon.

Cardigan of the week: Valentines Special

Hello!

Did you have a fabulous Valentine's Day yesterday? I hope you were feeling the love, whether you are married, dating or single.

Since it was Valentine's Day yesterday I've found you a romantic cardigan of the week which could also be an easy customisation project for a cardigan you already have. Changing the buttons and adding shaped pockets can give any cardigan a handmade feel and is easy to achieve in an evening. If you don't want to do it yourself, you can buy this supercute cardi from ASOS instead. The thing I like about this cardigan is that the heart button detail is subtle enough to add a little romance to every day.

Have a great day!

Amy Xxx