doilies and blankets

Last week Olive stayed up after Oski went to sleep, to do a little photography, her new favourite hobby, which we are completely in favour of. The series was called "Things That Are Special About Our House" and included this great photo of the stairs leading up to our loft.

When we were building, we had a vision of a gorgeous, handmade, recycled hardwood ladder, kind of like a ship's ladder. But then time and money got away from us, and several months after we moved in, we still only had a crappy, and pretty ugly, aluminium ladder. What to do when something that is absolutely necessary to your daily life is pretty bloody ugly and definitely not blending with the rest of your interior decor (which in our case jut means crazy amounts of colour and soft furnishings)?

Wrap it in a blanket, of course!

I've always been very in favour of yarn bombing, but had never actually tried it myself: I can't knit very well or very quickly, and any blankets that come home from the op-shop are too beautiful to chop up and wrap around a tree. But then our new friend Vanessa showed me this awesome video, Keeping the Chairs Warm, and I got completely inspired to give it a burl. 

The hunt for scarves and blankets began, and before long I had some to go on with. It's super easy to do, obviously, and very satisfying, in that it's pretty quick and totally transformative, and the ladder, thanks to the blankets and scarves, now 'matches' our decor perfectly!

Crocheted ladder in the early morning sun

Another item that needed a little bit of work at our place was our light shade. I've re-covered lamp shades from the op shop before, but this time I wanted to have a go at making one out of doilies, like this.

This, like the blankets, was super easy, and very satisfying, though we had a few false starts, I think on account of the fact that we used a bowl, rather than a ballon, so the semi-spherical shape wasn't as supportive of itself as a spherical shape would be, and was prone to, shall we say, 'softening'. A bit of fencing wire fixed that, though, and now we bask in the glow of the doily light each night. Though I do have a big balloon on order, because I still really want to try to make a giant round one...

And then in the morning, we wake up and eat a breakfast like this: 

A perfect summertime garden abundance user-upperer, consisting of green eggs and cherry tomatoes with basil. Here's how.

Halve your cherry tomatoes, and toss with some chopped basil, salt and olive oil (not too much!).

In another bowl, crack your eggs (we usually do 2 for each person). Then go for a stroll around your garden to see what greens you can gather.  If you don't have a veggie patch, walk down the street and see if you kind find some weeds! We used fat hen (our new, daily multivitamin), garlic chives, shallots, and parsley. 

While your toast is toasting, whisk up the eggs and your finely chopped herbs/weeds/greens with some salt and pepper, then pour into a pan of hot olive oil and scramble at will. It's sooooooo tasty....