Kokedama Moss Ball Plants: Space saving plants

Pressed to find pace for plants in your home? Get creative, make Kokedama, moss wrapping whatever plants take your fancy, herbs for the kitchen, ferns in the bathroom, spring bulbs, the choice is infinite. Suspend your moss ball plants, over the table or in a corner to create a hanging wonderland.

Making is my escape, even better when it’s something for my home. Kokedama is my guilty flight of fantasy, for me it's often about bringing the outside indoors. Flexing the creative muscle, the best tonic when I’m feeling jaded.

My kind of fun, getting in the flow, how do you recharge your batteries?

If you like this post you should check out my post on Kokedama Inspiration

Pantone Green with Pink: How to Work Contemporary with Vintage

A ladder of fresh green fern. Yes please, fresh lively pantone green with pink. What kind of pink? Rose, gold, plaster, copper, combine with lustre, splash with the swoosh of a brush. Styling interiors there’s colour in my blood pumping though my veins, combine colours how does it make you feel?

In the world of interiors and styling colour fashions come and go, how wonderful when a passion collides with the outside world. Pink splatter lustreware yes please! Colour referencing can give vintage and antique a contemporary edge. I always loved my grandfathers collection of Sunderland bowls lined up along his mirrored dresser. The severity of the graphic black steel engraved type against the anarchic abandonment of the splatter and swish of pink.

Kids in tow, oggling Sunderland bowls like his through the window of a bijou Georgian Hexham antique shop, thinking when will I ever have one and when I do, might it get destroyed? Recently I found this vintage mug, I don’t know where, I know nothing about it, I have no idea how old it is, not very. The utility of the shape and the pink lustre eases my need for those bowls. With the pink and green it's spot on for an eclectic contemporary interior.

If you liked this post make sure you check out my post on How to style your home using Sylvac Urns

The Flower Farmers Year : How to Grow and cut flowers for pleasure and profit by Georgie Newbery

Everyone loves to give and be given flowers, and if they are British grown even better. Georgie Newbery runs Common Farm Flowers and she’s used her flower farming knowledge to create the beautiful book The Flower Farmer’s Year, jam packed with sumptuous photos of British home grown flowers. It’s certainly not just a coffee table book, it’s an extensive how to guide, giving the secrets from start to finish to help you successfully grow your own cut flowers. And if you get bitten by the bug  the know how to create a thriving artisanal floristry business.

Over the past 30 years British flower growing has all but evaporated, to be replaced by supermarket flowers flown in from all over the world, arriving with their huge environmental impact. Flower farmer, Georgie asks the question why import flowers when we are perfectly capable of growing our own British flowers without damage to the environment? Georgie is generous with her knowledge and with step-by-step instructions she shows us how we can have a year round cut flower patch outside the back door. Georgie makes cut flower growing doable for both amateurs and professionals while still paying their tithe to nature .

A visual treat the pictures are of generous and exuberant confections of British seasonal flowers and foliage, rare as hens’ teeth in the high street florist. The variety of British flowers is stunning, there are fragrant sweet peas and romantic Love in the Mist, delicate roses mixed with feverfew, grasses marigolds and cow parsley.

Readable and inspirational, the book’s packed with information including tips from top gardeners and specialist growers. The chapters are handily divided to cover different kinds of plants and unusually there’s even one on shrubs for cutting. To help make the dream a reality there’s a useful resources section with advice on where to get seeds and plants. But don’t think growing all these flowers will turn you into a basket toting Marie Antoinette. The chapter on cutting and conditioning flowers finds Georgie advising, to keep flowers at their very best, cut them straight into a deep bucket of water. 

This book would make wonderful gift for any gardener or flower lover. Whether you’re an amateur gardener or aspiring artisanal florist the book wont be read just once, with it’s wealth of invaluable information and beautiful pictures you’ll find yourself returning to Georgies blooming corner of Somerset again and again.

The Flower Farmer’s Year: How to grow cut flowers for pleasure and profit

By Georgie Newbery

Published by

If you like this book review check out my review of 'My Tiny Indoor Garden' 

Look No Further for Affordable Design Icons: Design icons, something to aspire to, often out of reach for the ordinary person

Design icons, something to aspire to, often out of reach for the ordinary person. Good news! Not so with antique stoneware bottles. Sometime domestic ceramics, hardwearing, functional, they were the ultimate peoples product, now they come with their own unique history, I am a big fan.

Bottles like these have always featured in my life. As a child we dug them out of the pond in the spiny, the collection was organic, it grew then shrank, given away when moving on, new ones turning up, to start the cycle again.

The range of whites, like wines, describe with carefully picked words, mellow, creamy, blue, grey, mineral, earthy, stone, muddy, heritage. How do you describe your white?

Easy on the eye with simple utilitarian good looks, lyrical shapes, a curved shoulder, timeless classics they sit happily in both contemporary and classic interiors.

Why not take a minute to hop on over to the shop and take a look at the contemporary vintage ceramic collection on offer.

If you like this post check out my post on Kokedama Moss Ball Plants

Spring Flower Living Wall: Kokedama Inspiration

Can't wait to get out and see what's growing in the garden but feeling a bit cold? Bring outside into the house with moss wrapped bulbs. When I'm styling I'm always trying new ways to bring life, colour and texture to the home.  These moss wrapped hanging Kokedama bulbs are great to bring a fresh twist.  Suspend them to  make a stunning interior living wall, move them around to create a  lush planty corner. Everyday beauty, mixing plants with vintage crockery and contemporary ideas. 

Lots of vintage contemporary ceramic finds for your home over at the shop, take a look. Happy hunting!

If you liked this post check out my post on working with contemporary and vintage

Quinntessential Baking by Francis Quinn

You might find it strange, a designer writing a review about a baking book, but with her serious design credentials, Frances Quinn the winner of the Great British Bake Off in 2013 has shown she’s one to watch. Since she wowed the nation with her amazing baking skills and fabulous creations the designer baker has been writing her unique baking book Quintessential Baking, while creating commissions for huge brands like Nike and Cadburys as well as celebrities and tastemakers Jo Whiley, Paul Smith and Jo Munroe.

This is a book for everyone, novice or experienced baker. With her unique imagination, designer Quinn conjures up witty bakes that could sit happily on the pages of the books of writer Roald Dahl and illustrator Quentin Blake. The book is divided into sections, a different one for each different cake type. Proportions for these ‘master bakes’ are shown in easily readable pie charts of ingredients, giving the essential know how, leaving you to concentrate on creating your own imaginative bakes.

Packed with puns her gentle humour shines through in her playful bakes. We love her witty Sandwich Toast Cakes, look again to see it’s not beans on toast but peanuts in caramel on cake. In her Cheese Biscuits she cleverly manipulates your response with her attention to detail with holey ‘cheese biscuits’ and an entire paper wrapped Brie made from white chocolate.

The images play with scale, we are spell bound by a Lilliputian vintage ice cream van, monster cornetto strapped to the roof, driving across a beech of crushed biscuit sand. The creations look doable though many will take a large investment of time, one of the simplest was a very beautiful cup cake, decorated with flower confetti scattered over the buttercream topping and when you bite into it there’s a lovely surprise.

Extracts taken from Quinntessential Baking by Frances Quinn (Bloomsbury £25.00)

Photography © Georgia Glynn Smith

If you like this post check out my post on Millinery, the Art of Hat Making

Home For Now by Joanna Thornhill

If you are thinking personalizing your space on a very restricted budget is impossible, Home for Now by Joanna Thornhill is the book for you. It spotlights the challenges people are facing in housing, with astronomical house prices many are finding they have to live in temporary accommodation for much longer than expected. And even after managing to get a foot on the housing ladder, with the substantial debts incurred there is little budget left for splashing the cash when making home your own.

Home for Now has a wealth of inspirational detail and practical tips to show you how to make the most of the space you live in. The book is divided into chapters that target and analyse the needs of different living spaces with the message, plan and asses your needs before you start buying. As well as the practicalities, the book is packed with creative ideas and visuals to help you make changes reflecting your life and loves, the emphasis being very much on comfortable and stylish.

The style of Home for Now is eclectic, it’s about being flexible and taking a fresh look at what you have, can you repurpose or display it? In each chapter there are interiors make projects, refreshingly they are all hands on, using the minimum of skills to achieve stylish transformations of skip rescues, car boot finds and family hand me downs. Our favourite project is a very doable no sew chair, repainted and covered in a wild African print fabric.

Home for Now will leave the reader feeling confident about stamping their personality on their space and making home on a very restricted budget. Remember rules are there to be broken and be playful.

Home For Now by Joanna Thornhill, published by CICO Books (£16.99)

Photography by Emma Mitchell and James Gardiner © CICO Books

If you like this book review read my review of Making Winter by Emma Mitchell