Home-sweet-home – Page 2 – Friendly Nettle Cafe

June 6, 2016March 3, 2024 Rasa Pelham Budget £, Crafts!, Home-sweet-home

Mirror mirror on the wall…

When Lukas learned to roll he never stopped moving. Changing his nappy became such a challenge! This is how the idea of having mirror over changing unit came about. Since Lukas smiles at the image of himself (he certainly confident about his looks!) I thought having a mirror there would distract him.

I of course did not want to spend much money for this so I decided to reuse the mirror I already had. The only issue was with it is that it consisted of squares and I did not like tiled mirror look. This is when I thought of disguising it with geometric design. I got this idea after seeing similar mirror in Ikea few months ago.

For this quick DIY I used four 30X30 square mirrors, Command strips (a bit pricey, but it does not damage the wall so win win!), slim washi tape.

As usual I like to plan my design on paper, but it is possible to be spontaneous and create the look as you go. The choice is yours 😉

First I made the initial lines that are not on the mirror joints.

Then I applied Command strips on the back ready to apply the mirror squares on the wall.

Finally, I applied finishing lines on the mirror where they meet so they all concealed.

I am very pleased with the outcome of this mirror. The only thing that I am not 100% happy is the colour of washi tape when is on the glass. I was expecting it would be bright and bold, but now it rather look pastel. On the other hand Lukas just don’t care while applying multiple fingerprints on it. I guess I will have to clean it often to maintain the look. Will let you know if this design lasts.

Hope you feel inspired!
Rasa xoxo

March 11, 2016April 21, 2024 Rasa Pelham Home improovements, Home-sweet-home, Sewing

Lined curtains

Our bedroom has been painted last year, but we only have moved in from our spare room in February. What took us so long? The fact we did not have any curtains! I could not find the ones I liked, so I went trough make-your-own process instead. Which delayed our moving in date too many times! Anyways, I am really glad they are there and although it was a project on more challenging side (dealing with large amounts of fabric is not my thing I guess), I love the fabric I chose.
These are basic lined curtains that is good to know how to make. The instructions on how I made them are as follows ;-).

Have a lovely weekend everyone
Rasa xx

November 30, 2015 Rasa Pelham Budget £, Home improovements, Home-sweet-home, Upcycle

How we fitted a light fitting (+upcycled an old glass lamp shade)

As you may all know that we are working our bedroom to be while sleeping in our future office/craft room/guest room. Can’t wait till we move into our actual bedroom!
Today I would like to share about our lamp fittings that we installed recently. they only costed us few pennies (under £10 to be specific)! Yey! Thats because we reused some lampshades that we had in the corridor (I love to be able to use whats already in the house!). All I needed to do is buy the basic lamp fitting ;-). Neither of us are electricians so this is not a step by step guide how to wire the light fitting. Every house can have a different wiring so it would be pretty difficult to cover all here anyways. I fitted light fitting before which was pretty basic as it was a very similar one to the one I had to replace. I remember just removing old fitting wires and replacing with the new fitting wires in exact same way as it was. I guess I was lucky that time as that light fitting was not connected to any other light fitting in the house.
Before you begin it is very important!!

to switch off the lights and the electricity on the distribution board (that box with the switches).
start working (touching the wires) with the right hand, not both!

So to replace the light fitting in our new house we had to follow very a similar routine (even though the wiring is completely different and very very old). First we removed the cover and bit by bit unscrew the little screws on the connector that were holding all the wires. Eventually the light fitting base got freed! Then we connected the ceiling wires back to the new connector. Joni used this guide in order to connect old type of wires with new.When the wires on the ceiling were ready, we had to prepare the light fitting we bought for the fitting. Unfortunately it was a very long fitting perfect for high ceilings or landings, but not so good for our bedroom. Luckily Joni was able to adjust the length of it! He pulled the wire cord inwards, then cut it to required length and stripped the insulation leaving two wires open (neutral and live).We then attached the light fitting bracket onto the ceiling that suppose to hold the fitting itself (don’t worry, this comes with the fitting you buy). After fitting wires have been connected to the connector on the ceiling we closed it off by attaching the light fitting itself onto the bracket.Finally we are ready to hang the lampshade on the light fitting. Our lampshade was a glass ones so to restore it all we needed to do is to clean it! I dipped the lampshades into the soapy water, wiped it with the soft sponge and carefully dried it with the clean tea towel.To hang the lampshade I used shade reducer. I unscrew the light fitting skirt, inserted the lampshade then the reducer and finally put the skirt back on. I hope you found this useful!
Rasa xoxo

September 23, 2015 Rasa Pelham Home-sweet-home, Updates

Our new house tour

I am happy to announce that we have finally bought a house here in Shortstown (sounds a bit American, but be reassured this little town is in England very close to Bedford). Me and Joni fell in love with the architecture and location of it as soon as we saw it advertised. It was love from first sight! Yes, it needs loads of work, but we thing it has a great potential. The house is very large and spacious with a good size garden. It kind of makes me feel like I am about to live in councillor’s house because of it’s large windows and arched front porch.So watch this space for lots of interior DIY’s, because this time I am recording everything! It will of course won’t happen overnight, but we are hoping to at least decorate master bedroom very soon. The other parts of the house might take a while because of new baby joining us soon :-).One of our plans are to build a conservatory into the garden as well as extending this very small kitchen (pic bellow).This is where our sitting room with fireplace be (pic bellow).This bathroom need complete transformation as you can see.Nursery is coming to place sometime early next year.This is the master bedroom I was mentioning. It has a very cute walk through wardrobe to the bedroom no 2. We shall keep it for few years till we need more space and need to extend the stairs into the loft.And this is bedroom no 2. Guess what we are planning to do with it! It has a very funny surprise: random shower cubical! Will be removing it soon.Thanks for letting me share!
Rasa xoxo

September 8, 2015 Rasa Pelham Home-sweet-home, Inspiration, Plans&Goals, Updates

A colour story for our new home

I want something exciting to say. We have finally exchanged with our house purchase last week! Anybody who bought the house before know what it means: we will have this house for sure and the date is set when we could move in. Yey!
Ever since we exchanged I have been dreaming how we are going to decorate the house and what alterations we are going to make. I have done this before and it was difficult and long process. But now I am not alone so hopefully we will settle much quicker, although we have baby on the way so I am interested to see how difficult it will be to do at least some DIY.
I have started planning the colours. Why? Because I really really want everything to “flow” in the house and right now I already need to buy few things that will match (such as sofa bed for my mum to sleep in when she is visiting her grandchild). I must admit last time I was decorating the house I did not put so much effort in planning the colour… because I went an easy way and chose neutral colours (mostly white). Yes, I did get many comments that it looked like a hospital to begin with, although I accessorised it with bold colours so it was cute at the end). This time I want to be braver and try darker colours (gosh, I am sooooo scared that it may make the place look small). But I so love those eccentric rooms that I see on Pinterest, so the challenge is on!
So how did I create this colour story? I am very lucky that I have gone to Uni to do fashion. During my course one of the things I have learned is exactly that, creating a colour story for a collection. It is of course very different to creating a colour story for the house, but the goal is the same: to create a set of colours that will be used through out the project (in this case the whole house). Of course I had failed many times before. One instance I remember quite clearly when my colour story looked like a rainbow just because I liked many colours and because I arranged them in colour wheel order. Another thing I learned is to identify what colours are main and which ones are for the accents. For better visualisation arrange the accent colours in small amounts that could be displayed in a item form (such as red lamp in the pic below). The third advise I can give is to look through some pictures of the house interiors and see what colour arrangement you like (Pinterest or Houzz have been a good source to me). For instance I like the feature wall colour in the pic below combined with bold colour picture display on it.
I like red as an accent colour but I might try this and paint bigger furniture in red as well. The pic bellow comes from Apartment Therapy.
Although black is not a main colour in my colour story I would love to have a black board wall where we could scribble things! The pic bellow comes from IKEA website as an inspiration.And of course I would love to decorate the house with many plants! The pic bellow comes from My Attic.I hope you found this useful 🙂
Rasa x

May 8, 2015April 29, 2020 Rasa Pelham Arty Love, Embroidery, Home-sweet-home, Sewing

Cushion cover inspired by Liz Payne work

I loved Liz Payne’s work for quite some time now. I first came across it on Pinterest and I was completely mesmerised for it. Only recently I have decided to make something that is inspired by her work. Ok, not exactly in same colours, but still used similar technique! To make this cushion cover I first cut out the pattern needed and then painted it over with some oil based fabric paint (you can use any other fabric paint, but since I did it on dark fabric I wanted the paint colour to really stand out).Then I picked 3 thread colours to match the paint and started embroidering all over mostly using straight/basic stitch. I wanted to do other stitches such as fly stitch or even french knot stitch but realised that it would have taken up a lot of time (Liz Payne must really have a lot of patience!). There you go, my finished cushion cover! For full DIY click here.I hope you feel inspired too x
Rasa

March 21, 2015 Rasa Pelham Budget £, Crochet, Home-sweet-home, Upcycle

Never ending, upcycled crochet rug (made of socks!)

Hi there and here are my olds socks! You are probably wondering why I am showing my colourful collection of socks that I no longer wear. Well… I kept them for very very long for the day like this when I finally go ahead and do the upcycling project that I had thought of ages ago. To be honest what really prompted me to do it is finding out that my friend is also on the same idea and well ahead of me ( I am quite competitive and everything tend to be a race for me even if the other person have no idea that I am racing with them), I went ahead and did it.
So today I will share how it all went. I essentially made a mini rug (still in process to get bigger and bigger) out of socks that are too worn to wear but too pretty to throw away. To make the ‘yarn’ I have cut the sock in spiral direction,then joined it with other socks by tying the knot.I ended up with a ‘yarn’ ball that was big enough to start crochet. I started with the chain stitch!Then formed a circle. For the tutorial video click here! When the ‘yarn’ ball is finished you can always attach another sock to it. It can be never ending, always expanding circle rug!Hide all the knots on the wrong side (that side that faces the floor, which is not visible).My rug is tiny at this moment, but don’t you worry it will soon expand when I add all Joni’s old socks in it :-D. I hope you found this inspiring!
Rasa xoxo

October 31, 2014 Rasa Pelham Home-sweet-home, Sewing

It's a hold up! Feathers McGraw strikes again! (as a door stopper)

Do you remember this from Wallace & Gromit “The Wrong Trousers”? If not then I really really recommend watching it! I love every detail of this stop motion movie. Joni and I particularly like the Feathers McGraw character, notorious criminal mastermind and bird of many faces. He is so mysterious and funny at the same time! Joni suggested that I should make my next door stopper just like him :-).
I wanted to make Feathers McGraw in his chicken disguise, but sadly making his comb (aka the rubber glove on his head) did not quite work out. The fabric I used (PVC sort of fabric as I thought this would represent rubber glove best) did not invert back well after stitching on the wrong side. Maybe you have better ideas for this? Maybe thinner fabric? Anyways, the pattern above is an initial pattern that worked well, minus the chicken comb. Click HERE to see how I made it!Feathers Mcgraw turned out quite friendly after all, he serves as a perfect door stopper :). Really pleased with this project!I hope you will enjoy this project too!
Rasa 🙂

September 25, 2014 Rasa Pelham Home-sweet-home, Sewing

How to transform a stuffed toy into a door stop

Since we have moved to our new home we have been missing doors kept open everywhere. The issue is that it’s not easy to keep a heavy door open. The door stopper seems like the only solution. If only we had one door to stop! We have at least three doors that we would like to keep open and we have been stopping it with random stuff such as old laptops (the ones that no longer work, but Joni is keeping them for further experiments). Anyhow, only yesterday I thought of the idea to easily make a door stopper from a stuffed toy. I am thinking to make more door stoppers in the future of course (well… at least one more), but for now this seemed like a great idea! I used this stuffed bird toy that I made last year as a pillow initially, but then it became a shelve deco instead. The only other material/tools I needed to make this transformation is a seam ripper, matching tread & sewing needle and ceramic baking beans (general gravel stones, rice or beans can be used as well, although if you are using grains you probably would need it in bigger quantities). Transforming a stuffed toy into a door stopper is easy. All you need to do is open a seam at the bottom of the toy by using a seam ripper(1.), remove some of the stuffing (not all as you need some to keep a soft shape)(2.) and fill it with the heavy filling such as ceramic baking beans (3.). Don’t forget to stitch the seam back to how it was 😉 (4.).It’s important to remember that you choose a stuffed toy that have a good/wide bottom base. This bird only managed to keep the lighter door open. This is because it has a very slim base with only one seam at the bottom. In this case I would add more weight by inserting more of ceramic bean filling. I am sure you can play around with the different types of heavy fillings to make it work for you ;-). Door stopper works the best when it is placed at the edge of the door. It also depends on what surface you are placing it on. It worked really well on the carpet, whilst on the tiles or wood floor the door stopper might slide. Hope you found this helpful 😉
Rasa xoxo

May 29, 2014 Rasa Pelham Home-sweet-home, Upcycle

Painting terracotta pots

I don’t know about you, but I really like having variety when it comes to plant pots. I recently have found few terracotta pots in my front garden, so I thought I should paint them since I already had one naked terracotta pot ;-).

All I did was paint the pot with the interior paint (I mixed ivory colour with black to get this lovely grey). Let it dry between each colour (1-2). I lightly brushed the dry paint with sand paper to get the vintage effect (3). Finally, I have sealed the paint with PVA (4): that is 5 parts water and 1 part PVA.

I hope you enjoyed this little upcycling technique 🙂
Rasa x