CHAPTER SIX

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Arty Crafty Bits

BOHEMIAN, SHABBY CHIC OR BEAUTIFULLY RUSTIC, there’s something gorgeously tactile about something you’ve made yourself. Let’s face it, self-sufficiency is a creative way of life from start to finish, so it makes complete sense that how you fill the personal space around you, how you dress and present yourself to the world, even the gifts you give should be a part of that.

As with so much of self-sufficiency, there are crossovers that this chapter explores. If you have sheep, you have to have them shorn; and if you have to get them shorn, you have to do something with the wool; and from that the logical progression is to knit. If you have bees, there is all that wax with which to make candles. If you have trees, or use split wood for the fire, then you could hand-carve spoons or eggcups. If you have reeds or willows, you could make a wicker basket. If you have leftover scraps of fabric, you could make a rag rug … the list goes on and on.

Of course this form of expression is open to everyone regardless of whether you’ve ever shorn a sheep in your life (if you haven’t, seriously, don’t – it kills your back) or spent a pleasant hour sifting through a hive in search of a queen, because we are all surrounded by bits and pieces of life that can be jazzed up and repurposed. Alternatively, go for a ride to the beach to seek out some driftwood or find some nature, or simply go online. There is no excuse not to be creative, it’s good for the soul and our mental health, and at the end of it you’ve got something that you’ve done, something tangible that you’ve achieved and can say, ‘Yeah, I did that.’

JEWELLERY

Handcrafted jewellery is about three things: the colour, the shape and the sentiment. Colour first, colour always first. From the deepest, richest maroon to a cool lilac, your jewellery will live and die by the colour. It denotes what it will go with, whether it’s daytime or evening wear, and ultimately how long it will remain a favourite. Next consideration is shape. Do you want it crafted, such as metalwork or clay, or maybe something a little more natural like seaglass or leather. Finally, there’s sentiment. Of course, this is optional – you can love something that has absolutely no sentimental value whatsoever, or vice versa. But when that piece of jewellery slips from favourite status you’re much more likely to keep it around if there’s something more to it than just being pretty. Examples might be a bracelet made with hair delicately platted from your horse, or a locket containing a tiny picture of a loved one. But sentiment doesn’t have to be that intense or personal to be special; a ring carved from the wood of a 100-year-old whisky barrel can look and make you feel amazing.

GETTING STARTED WITH JEWELLERY

As with many aspects of self-sufficiency, starting out can feel rather daunting, but if you set out with baby steps and focus on one type of jewellery to start with, knowing that you can veer off into other aspects later, is a pretty safe bet.

Use whatever you have around you. The world is truly beautiful – have you ever really looked at a piece of bark from a tree, or a shell from the shore, even a stone on the path? The colours and textures can be incredible. Be inspired by the little things that can hold so much beauty.

Don’t give up! Chances are that your first few attempts will be absorbing and fun, but you’re probably not going to want to pin them on your gorgeous little Gucci top and step out for the night, but in a short amount of time you’ll be more and more pleased with what you make and it won’t be long before you’re turning out jewellery you are really proud of.

Pendants, broaches, threaded bracelets or necklaces are great jumping off points, and require very few tools other than maybe a magnifying glass if you’re going really tiny and delicate.

BASKET-MAKING

This is a beautiful art, and totally absorbing. Forget everything for an afternoon in the comforting knowledge that at the end of it you will have produced something practical that will be handy for decades to come. People have been weaving baskets as a means of carrying things for some 12,000 years, and probably for millennia before that, because of course the evidence will remain intact for only so long (though you’d have to admit that a basket made 12,000 years ago and still recognizable today is pretty good going).

One of the reasons why baskets would have lasted so long is the material they were made from. Although you can weave baskets from anything that’s flexible, the old basket-makers would have used hard materials such as oak, ash and hickory, and there is a long history in North America of using long-leaf pine needles. Today the favoured approach is to use reed and cane because they soak quickly and become pliable and easy to weave, whereas the old oaks and ashes would have taken days to absorb water and soften. If you do decide to use these traditional materials, you will need to work outside. Boil them in something like a Baby Belling or on a camp stove and then allow them to cool (this is the quickest way to soften them), and make sure you wet them frequently when you’re working them at the first sign of cracking or brittleness.

Unless you are determined to be traditional, however, this is where the self-sufficient urge to recycle comes to the fore, because you can use anything that’s flexible and can be cut into strips, from magazines and newspapers to leather, fabric (including denim) and plastic bags, on to string, wool, wire or rope, horsehair, willow and straw.

Techniques

There are four main techniques in basket-making, with lots of embellishments and subtleties that can be added to each.

1. A woven basket starts with a frame of ridged spokes around which a more pliable material is woven in and out in a weft pattern.

2. A twined basket is when two or more flexible materials are twisted between each spoke of the frame.

3. A plaited basket is when strips are woven together without a separate frame to create a chessboard pattern.

4. A coiled basket (the most intricate, the most difficult and probably the most beautiful style) is when a spiralling oval or circle of strands is stitched in place using one thinner strip.

See the diagrams opposite for examples of these techniques.

Weaving a simple basket

You will need 10 strips of reed to form the base and the uprights, and then some weaving reeds, which hold the sides of the basket together. Lay five of the reeds on a flat surface rough side up (the smooth side is the neat side and that will make the outer edge), equally spaced, with a gap the same width as the reed between each strip. Take the second five strips and weave them through, maintaining the gaps all the while, until you end up with a woven square in the middle of your reeds, all neat, straight and tidy. This is the base of your basket.

All around the edge of the base, tease the strands into bending upwards. Pick one strand, and, with a sharp knife, cut a vertical slit (just a little longer than the width of your weaving reed) at the point where the strand bends up. Poke one of the weaving reeds into the slit – this will keep the reed in place as you begin to weave it in and out of the uprights. When you have finished the second layer, all the vertical strands should be standing straight up. If they are pointing in, your corners are too tight and you should loosen them a little. If they are pointing out, gently pull the weave a little tighter until all the strands are standing correctly. Continue weaving in and out of the frame for another couple of rows until you are four rows high. When you get to the end of your first weaving reed, cut a slit in an upright reed, as before, and poke its end into it, so that it is invisible from the outside, then start a new reed in the same fashion, and carry on weaving.

Now gently support the top of the basket with one hand while tugging the strands. This helps to compact the weaves. Stand the basket on a flat surface and check to see if it sits flat. If it wobbles or is uneven, carefully tug the centre strands until they are just higher than the corners – this should enable the basket to stand on the four corners, thus eliminating the wobble. Now return to weaving.

The four main techniques used in basket-making

weaving

twining

plaiting

coiling

When it’s about six or seven layers high, stop weaving. Make certain the weaves are nice and tight and well compacted down on one another, and trim the vertical strands about 2.5cm/1in above the top line. If your reed has dried out by now, damp it down again, then fold the strands over the top and tuck them inside the basket (it often helps to use a small screwdriver to help poke the ends into a pocket on the inside weave).

To rim the top, wrap a new strand around the outside of the top edge (the ‘rim strand’), and, taking a thinner strand, sew it over the top of the rim strand and through the weave, back over the top of the rim strand and back though the next gap in the weave, so it’s like a big, looping, running stitch back and forth, going all round the basket, which will keep the rim strand firmly in place.

Try these basic techniques a few times until you feel reasonably comfortable with the process before venturing on to something larger and more complicated. The more you do, the faster you get and the more confident you feel. And don’t think that your trial efforts will go to waste, because if you weave flat lids for the small baskets and secure them along one end with a couple of woven hinges to form lids, they make really lovely boxes and are especially good to use in place of wrapping paper for birthday and Christmas gifts.

CURING AND TANNING

Within this neat little package we call our bodies is the exact amount of oil to tan our own hides. The same goes for all animals, from a fox to a cow, and that oil is found in the brain. Lecithin is the body’s natural tanning agent, and if you go back to 20,000 BC, people would have mixed the animal brain in a water solution and actually used it to tan the hides (in fact, the native Americans used mashed brains for tanning until the end of the 19th century). Today, despite all the computers and advances and everything else, that traditional method is still used, although we have tweaked some of the less hygienic aspects. To soften an animal skin, tanners throughout the Middle Ages and onwards would have worked the skins in a solution of faeces, urine and rotting animal flesh to tenderize it, and this was done by steeping the skins in a huge vat and then treading it in for hours on end, in the same way that wine-makers used to tread grapes. I’m assuming that these were probably men and (just a wild stab in the dark) also probably bachelors, certainly until baths and soap were invented – not to mention bleach. For this reason, and a very good reason it is too, tanneries were always sited a long way outside of the village.

Though the tanners themselves were often amongst the poorest in the community, they were in elite company, as it says in Genesis that God himself made clothes for Adam and Eve out of animal skin before he evicted them from the Garden of Eden. From the leather sandals of the ancient Egyptians to the leather coats, wallets, handbags, boots and sheepskin rugs of today, curing and tanning rawhide into leather is something we cannot imagine living without.

With the discovery of certain chemicals, and particularly acids, the methods changed to those we know today – virtually all hides are now commercially tanned using chemicals. Curing the hide follows exactly the same principle as curing meat, and involves salting to preserve (otherwise the skin will begin to rot when it is first removed from the animal). Tanning is altering the chemical structure of the hide to make it durable and waterproof. Cure a hide and it is still a skin. Tan a hide and it becomes leather.

Curing small-animal fur

Of course, curing animal fur can be done using the old traditional methods of faeces, urine and rotting animal flesh, but that’s a slightly scary and very smelly method, as well as being an utterly foolproof way to lose every friend you’ve got. It’s much better to seek a less alarming alternative, and there is one that is still natural, and works with smaller skins such as rabbit, squirrel and most small-animal furs.

For the best results, you need to work the skin within 1 hour of the animal being killed, and you should keep it in a cool, shady spot throughout the process. Remove the skin carefully, making sure there are no tears, and tack it to a wooden board, fur-side down and reasonably stretched out. Take a handful of table salt and sprinkle it liberally over the skin until the whole thing is covered, then massage it in with the tips of your fingers. Wipe the salt away with clean water and a sponge until most of the salt has gone. Then make an alum solution by dissolving 1 tablespoon alum in roughly 600ml/1 pint/2½ cups water and, using the same sponge, wipe the alum/water solution over the skin once every 6–8 hours for 3 days, then leave for a further 10 hours to dry. When the skin is dry, remove the tacks that held it to the board and roll the skin like a giant cigar quickly one way, then the other, back and forth until it feels soft and pliable. It’s now ready to use.

CANDLE-MAKING

Nothing inspires intimate conversation and romance quite like a room lit with candles, and a room lit with homemade candles can boast an ambience of sexy self-sufficiency. There are many beautiful candles you can buy, but virtually all of them can also be made at home and are perfect as gifts, to sell as a little cottage industry, to pamper yourself (with a candlelit bath, glass of ice-cold white wine and some relaxing music) or to set the scene on a romantic evening.

Making candles is easy, and every candle is created using one of two methods: heating wax and pouring it into a mould or rolling a flat sheet of wax into a fat cigar. The materials are simple: wax and wicks, plus scented oils if you want to go the whole hog.

Wax

You can buy wax online or from any craft and hobby shop, but the thrifty way is to save up all the stubs from old candles and render them down. Most wax is based on paraffin (a by-product of oil refining), and candles made of paraffin wax burn in on themselves. By contrast, candles made of beeswax (a natural alternative, which can be quite expensive) run. Soy wax, invented in 1992, is a natural, long-lasting, low-soot option that is becoming increasingly popular. Other natural waxes include palm wax and vegetable wax.

Wicks

To make your own wicks, take a length of strong cotton, such as kite string, and soak it in a solution of 2 tbsp table salt and 4 tbsp borax (sodium borate) dissolved in a mug of warm water for 20 minutes. Take it out and hang it up to dry for 5–7 days. When it’s completely dry, dip it into melted wax and hold it up so that most of the wax runs off. After a few minutes it will be cool enough to lay flat. You can then cut it into the lengths you require, keeping what you don’t need for another time.

Scented oils

Adding a few drops of an essential oil to your candle will give it therapeutic qualities, but do ensure the oil you use is natural and undiluted. Coconut oil is lovely for a bright summer’s evening; lavender will help you sleep (to be avoided at all costs if you are planning a romantic evening for two, and never allow a candle to burn while you sleep); bergamot is uplifting; and citronella is a natural fly deterrent.

Making a pillar candle

Small plastic milk cartons make perfect moulds for pillar candles. Clean and dry a carton and cut it to the height you want the candle to be. Fix the base of the wick at the bottom in the centre with a little dribble of wax (just enough to hold it in place). Wrap the top of the wick around a wooden chopstick (or something similar) and balance it across the top of the carton so that the wick is in the centre. Heat the wax you are using in a pan until it has melted and turned clear, then fill the carton not quite to the top, tapping all around the outside to release any air bubbles. Allow it to cool and set completely before carefully cutting the plastic away.

For a multi-coloured candle, pour in the first colour and when it’s just set but not yet firm, pour in the next layer. Adding the second layer when the first is not quite set means that the two waxes will bond together, and you get that lovely shading in at the point where the two meet.

Making a no-heat beeswax candle

This is an ideal fun-time treat for children because it does not involve hot wax. Beeswax comes in sheets and is quite easy to buy if you don’t have your own bees. Lay out the sheet with a wick placed along one end, sticking out at the top slightly, and roll it into a cylinder – tightly or loosely, it doesn’t matter. When it’s done, simply trim the ends.

Making a hand-rolled candle

On the same theme as the beeswax candle, take a tray and lay a piece of greaseproof paper on it, smoothed out so the paper is completely flat, without a wrinkle. Scrunch the edges of the paper up by about 2cm/¾in (to keep the wax in place) and form into a rough square, about 30cm/12in across. Heat the wax and, little by little, build up a puddle of wax on the paper; each layer will set very quickly. When it’s cool, but still pliable, trim off the rough edges of the square to give a nice neat shape (saving the trimmings for re-melting), lay a wick at one edge of the square and roll as above.

Making a sand candle

Fill a bowl with damp sand and make a smooth dip in the middle by pressing down with a tablespoon. Make sure it’s as smooth and symmetrical as you can get it. Put a wick in the bottom and secure it across the top with a wooden chopstick, then pour in the hot wax. Let it cool completely, then lift it out of the sand, trim the wick and gently tap the candle to remove any excess sand.

MAKING PAPER AND GREETINGS CARDS

Until the industrialization of the 19th century, all paper was hand-made one sheet at a time. The word ‘paper’ is derived from the Latin papyrus, which described the ancient Egyptians’ form of paper – a flat woven sheet made from strips of the papyrus plant. Despite this, however, paper was not actually invented by the Egyptians, but rather by the Chinese, and to this day some of the most beautiful paper still comes from China.

Making paper at home is all about recycling: taking old newspapers, old utility bills (nothing more satisfying than putting a bill into a blender and blitzing it) and turning them into crisp new sheets ready to be used. (Note, though, that the ink from newsprint does come through, so you may need to add a little bleach to your pulp solution.) In fact, in both Britain and America, around 70 per cent of the material used to make all the paper each year comes from recycling. Paper manufacturers collect old newspapers and magazines and subject them to a simple process that can be recreated in any kitchen, though the process is a little soggy – which makes it ideal for children! But it’s not just wood and recycling that can be used to make paper, and more industrious makers use rags, cotton and even elephant dung, though quite how many self-sufficient households would have an elephant is questionable.

How to make paper

EQUIPMENT

Washing-up bowl

Blender

Deckle (see opposite)

2 tea towels

Rolling pin

Iron

The most important thing for making paper is a deckle. A deckle is the frame in which the paper is made. You can buy them from craft shops and online, and if you are going to turn this into a small business, then it’s worth the investment. But if you are only going to make a few odd sheets, then it’s cheaper to make your own deckle.

To make a deckle, take an old picture frame (car boot fairs and recycling centres are ideal places for finding old pictures), the inside measurement of which is just a little bigger than the piece of paper you want to create, but smaller than a washing-up bowl. You also need to source some fine mesh that is the same size as the frame (the ideal is the gauze used in a screen door or the fine mesh for windows on a chicken house to keep the flies out). Take the glass, picture and backing out of the frame and cut the gauze so it fits snugly into the frame and staple or pin it in place. That’s the deckle.

For an even quicker version, get a wire coat hanger and bend it into a rough square with the hook at one corner. Pull a stocking (or one leg of a pair of tights) over it from the opposite corner to the hook, right down to the foot, and tie a piece of string at the corner where the hook is so the stocking is as tight as a drum. This works well as a one-off, but is unlikely to last any longer than that.

Prepare the paper you are going to use by shredding it, ripping it into strips or tearing it into coin-size pieces. Note that, as a rule of thumb, every two A4 sheets of paper will make one A4 sheet of homemade paper, though this obviously depends upon how thick you want your paper to be. Half-fill the bowl with warm water and soak the prepared paper for about 1 hour, then drain through a colander. Half-fill the blender with water, and add a little of the pulped paper, taking care not to add too much in one go as it will just clump. Blend it until it is completely smooth without any lumps, adding more pulp little by little.

Meanwhile, rinse out the washing-up bowl and half-fill it again with warm water. Slide in your deckle so it rests on the bottom and add a spray of laundry starch to help stiffen the paper. When the blending of your pulp is complete, pour it into the water and swish it around so it settles evenly. If you want to make a large or thick sheet, and so need more pulp, blend some more paper until you are happy that the amount in the bowl is thick enough to create the sheet. Swish the whole lot once more, if necessary, and let it settle (shake the deckle a little if you feel it is still not landing evenly), then carefully lift out the frame and rest it over the bowl to drain. When it has stopped dripping, gently press down with the tips of your fingers to help squeeze out any excess moisture.

Lay a clean tea towel over the deckle and place a plate on top of that. Holding all three layers (deckle, tea towel and plate) together, invert them on to a flat surface. Lift off the deckle and slide out the plate, so the tea towel is resting on a flat surface with the sheet of paper in the middle of it. Lay the other tea towel over the top and use the rolling pin to roll the paper ‘sandwich’ to squeeze out as much water as possible.

Remove the top tea towel and let the paper dry for a good couple of hours (it should not be left to dry out completely, just until it’s mostly dry), then iron it with a medium-to-low iron, still with the tea towel as a backing. Leave it for 12 hours, then peel the paper away from the tea towel. Leave it for another 12 hours, and your homemade paper is ready.

If you are an incurable romantic and want to use your homemade paper to write a love letter, add a couple of petals or leaves for a girl, or straw or herbs for a man, into your pulp at the blending stage after the pulp has been blended until smooth.

Making a greetings card

In the UK alone it is estimated that in excess of £1.5 billion each year is spent on buying greetings cards. There are masses and masses of cards available, but none of them compares with a handmade card, as any parent will testify the first time their little one hands them a card they have made themselves. Sending a homemade card says so much more than one bought from a shop, so the next time someone you know has a birthday, don’t buy a card (and certainly don’t send an e-card!) – make one.

Of course, the best way would be to attach a sheet of your homemade paper to the front of a folded piece of thick card so it sits in the middle and write your message on that. Alternatively, you can use stencils or images from the internet, or for a birthday you could print off a montage of events that have happened on that day in history, or famous people who also have a birthday on that date, by going to www.brainyhistory.com.

For something different and a little special, try hand-stitching a card by drawing a pattern on a separate sheet of paper (or trace a picture) and lay it on top of your card. Take a pin and work your way around the outside of the picture, making holes at regular intervals, so that when you take the top sheet away the pin marks outline the image. Then sew around it using a backstitch or zigzag stitch.

PICTURE FRAMES

The obvious progression from homemade paper is to draw or paint on it before framing your masterpiece, and okay, of course you’ve got to be reasonably arty in order to produce something worthy of hanging on the wall, but this is what self-sufficiency is all about, having something entirely homemade, by you, that when you look at it, it makes you smile. And for that, it doesn’t have to be a Rembrandt – in fact, if it was, it would almost detract from what you’re trying to achieve. Shabby chic isn’t just reserved for furniture, sometimes a pencil sketch, no matter how rustic or rough, can be really effective in the right frame.

Picture frames can be anything from driftwood to shells, bundles of sticks to cogs and wheels from old engines, or more delicate ones from clocks or watches, soldered into lines. Whatever materials you decide to use, the key is in getting the right angles square. That’s where your time and effort will be spent. There are jigs and templates you can get to help, or simply draw around something you already know to be square and lay your materials on top. When cutting the sides, remember – measure twice, cut once.

WOOD CARVING

It may sound obvious, but the first thing to do when you want to carve something is choose the wood. The difference between softwood, such as pine, and hardwood, such as oak, beech and ash, is that while the softwood might be easier to carve, it will not last as long or carve as nicely as a hardwood. Make sure the log is well seasoned (one that has been cut for at least a year, so has weathered its way though each of the four seasons) and looks undamaged.

When using wood in its natural form, it is important to follow the line of strength, which, in a tree, runs from bottom to top, not side to side. When you look at a tree stump, you can see the rings that mark its growth. Never be tempted to create an item across these rings, as it will curve and twist. Instead, always follow the grain, whether it’s the trunk of a tree you are using or a branch, and try to use wood from the middle of the tree/branch, where the rings are closest: you will get the prettiest patterning and the least curving and twisting.

One of the nicest and easiest things you can carve from wood is a spoon. The feel of a hand-carved spoon is unlike anything mass-produced. It feels chunky and solid and deliciously tactile, and when you use it to stir a cooking pot, it sits snugly in your hand. For anyone who cooks, a hand-carved spoon is as personal and important as their favourite knife.

Wooden spoons have, unfortunately, gained a negative connotation from being used as the description of a booby prize in a competition. In Wales, by contrast, beautifully ornate hand-carved wooden spoons were given as love tokens, and were known as love spoons. The origin of the Welsh love spoon is somewhat hazy, but it doesn’t take much imagination to piece together the intimacy of the gift: literally, it is something that the woman would put in her mouth and use to feed herself, but it’s also a figurative representation of her man’s desire to provide for and look after her. It’s lovely. As to the symbols that were carved on the spoon handles, such as diamonds, hearts, crosses and birds, they spoke (and still do speak) a language of their own.

Carving a wooden spoon

Making a spoon, whether it’s a love spoon or a practical spoon for cooking, takes a little bit of time and effort, but it’s well worth it, and once you get the basic shape you can whittle anywhere: on a park bench while the dog charges around, sitting on the back doorstep or even in front of the fire with the log basket between your knees.

EQUIPMENT

Pencil

Fretsaw

Stanley knife with a brand-new blade

Gouge knife (optional)

Sandpaper – different grades from coarse to extra-fine

Choose a log about 30cm/12in long and at least 10cm/4in in diameter, following the guidelines above, and split it top to bottom down the centre. This is the time to spot any flaws that may affect your spoon, such as rot-spots, cracks or infestations. If you see any of these, discard the log and start again. If the wood looks good, then measure about 4cm/1½in back from the centre (no need to be too accurate) on one of the halves, and split it again, top to bottom, at this point so you end up with effectively a thick plank (once again checking both sides for flaws).

Now take the pencil and draw an outline of your spoon. This is going to be the actual outline of your spoon, so try to get it as symmetrical and straight as possible, either by drawing around another spoon or by making a template out of cardboard first. Using a vice or a work bench, carefully cut out the shape of the spoon with the fret-saw. What you should end up with is a spoon shape if you look down on it from above, but very thick – sort of the spoon equivalent of a platform shoe.

Now it is just a case of carving away the excess wood with the Stanley knife, little by little. Before you start, put a thick plaster on your thumb or wrap some leather around it to protect it. Then, beginning at the back of the spoon, work down the handle of the spoon until it is roughly the right shape, but do not worry too much about getting it perfect, as the sanding at the end will smooth it out and round it off. When you get to the back of the bowl, work from the outside to the centre, making sure you leave enough wood so it’s nice and proportionally deep. Turn the spoon over and start working down the handle once again. If you have a gouge knife for scraping out the bowl, then so much the better. If not, continue using the same knife and work it as though you were making a ham-fisted attempt at scooping out the innards of a hard-boiled egg.

Once the basic form of the spoon has been realized, and you are happy with the depth and shape of the bowl, take the coarsest grade of sandpaper and begin smoothing it. Wipe the spoon regularly with a clean cloth, and as soon as most of the obvious cut marks have disappeared, work down through the grades, spending more time on the finer grades than the coarse ones. When it’s finally completed, a little oil will help to protect it and also bring out the grain. If your spoon is to be used, use a light olive oil; if it’s just decorative, use linseed oil.

Once you get the hang of carving spoons, you’ll find it’s both addictive and therapeutic, and you can go on to embellish the handle or even the bowl with beautifully intricate patterns. You can also use the same method to make bowls, ladles and eggcups. If you have a child, you could also make them their very own wizard wand, like Harry Potter’s, by working intricate designs, as for the spoon handle, on a suitable length of wood.

PYROGRAPHY

Also known as branding, firework or pokerwork, pyrography is writing with fire, and it is a skill that is recognized to have been in existence since the 1st century BC, though it probably dates back much further. At its most basic level, pyrography is used to personalize an item such as a wooden spoon (or a wizard’s wand) by burning the name into the wood of the person to whom it belongs, or the craftsman who created it. At its most artistic level, it is used to create wonderful pictures, with a subtlety of shading and texture you simply could not craft on any medium other than wood.

Technology has advanced even this most ancient form of writing and there is specialist equipment available, which looks like a cross between a thick pen and a soldering iron, that can be bought and plugged into the mains. Alternatively, you can use a soldering iron, or be authentic and get a poker with a sharp pointed end and rest it in a hot fire to heat up.

Writing with fire

You can use pyrography to decorate eggcups or spoon handles, to draw a picture, to burn the name of a house on a house sign (or that of a horse to pin on a stable door – unless it’s the type of horse who would eat it!) or even to sign a fine piece of work as its creator, just as many distinguished cabinet-makers used to do.

Use a pencil to trace exactly what you want to burn first, and then, when you’re happy with your design or lettering, take your red-hot iron and lightly follow the pencil mark with the tip. The heavier you press, the darker the scorch will be, so use a heavy hand for the main image/writing and a lighter hand for shading.

A lovely idea if you have a kitchen table is to ask special friends and family members to put a hand on the table top, draw around it with a pencil before burning it in. Over time you’ll create a mass of hands of all those closest to you.

SOFT FURNISHINGS

This term encompasses a wide variety of items that make our homes more attractive and more comfortable to live in. From cushions and quilts to curtains and blinds, via lampshades and chair covers, soft furnishings are what turn a house into a home. Better still, you can do most of them yourself (actually, all of them yourself if you are handy with a needle, a sewing machine, knitting needles and a crochet hook), which means you won’t be paying large sums of money for custom-made curtains or buying ‘ethnic’ rag rugs from trendy stores: you’ll be making them all yourself.

Knitted blankets

Some soft furnishings, such as knitted blankets, are very easy to make. If you can knit, then you can knit a square. And if you can knit a square and sew, then you can sew the squares together to form a knitted blanket, since most blankets are a collection of squares fitted together. (If you can’t knit at all, flip to page 190, where knitting is explained and a website source is given.) From a baby’s coverlet to a teenager’s Bart Simpson, Harry Potter or Girls Aloud bedspread, and on to a touch of home for a young adult in university digs, a wedding present for a daughter or something just for you – it all starts with casting on the first stitch and knitting that first square. Once the top of the bed looks beautiful, turn your hand to a hot-water bottle cover or a new throw for the sofa. Once you can knit, anything (well, anything knitted) is possible.

Patchwork quilts

A step up from a knitted blanket is a patchwork quilt, which combines two skills: patchwork and quilting.

The origin of patchwork (shapes of fabric sewn together to make a pretty pattern or block) is thought to date back to the 12th century, when pieces of fabric were stitched together to make underwear for Mongolian soldiers to wear beneath their heavy armour, so protecting them from the bitter winters. One of the best books on patchwork quilting, which will show you many different pattern blocks, is The Sampler Quilt Book by Lynne Edwards.

The beauty of a homemade patchwork quilt is that so much of it can be made from recycled material. The only stipulation, certainly for the beginner, is that you use only 100 per cent cotton, as manmade fabrics tend to stretch out of shape. The exception to this rule is denim (which often has Spandex or Lycra in it these days), as the toughness of the close weave keeps the shape nicely; though if you have lots of old pairs of jeans you want to turn into patchwork, never use the knees – you can spot them a mile away! The ideal materials are old shirts or off-cuts from dressmaking.

As for quilting, this was popular for making blankets and was used by the ancient Egyptians as a means to keep warm against the cold desert nights. Quilting is taking a sandwich of top and bottom layers of fabric, with a layer of wadding in between, and sewing them together with a simple running stitch, in and out, about eight stitches per 2.5cm/1in. The bottom layer, known as the backing, is normally a single piece of fabric, such as broadcloth or muslin, whilst the top will be patchwork if you are making a patchwork quilt, but could just be a piece of fabric if not.

Making a patchwork quilt

Start small with a lap quilt (a scaled-down version of a bed quilt) or a baby’s cot quilt – or even a picnic quilt – and aim to move up bit by bit to something more ambitious, rather than starting out on a king-size quilt straight away and getting daunted and dispirited (then hiding the part-worked quilt in the cupboard under the stairs, never to be seen again).

EQUIPMENT

A2 cutting mat

45mm/1¾in rotary cutter (dressmaking scissors will do at a push, but it’s difficult to get any real accuracy with shears, as you need to lift the material in order to get the blade of the scissors underneath it)

Ruler

Sewing machine

Before you start cutting and sewing your patchwork, put all the fabrics you intend to use through the washing machine, even if they are brand new, as this gets rid of any dust from the manufacturing process and will help to preshrink the fabric, hopefully eliminating that danger later on. Iron the fabrics, then lay the first fabric you are using on the cutting mat, and, using the rotary cutter, cut out the required shape. Continue cutting in this way, using all the fabrics you intend to use, until you have cut all the shapes required for the quilt. Sew the shapes together following the instructions in the book mentioned above, or any other good patchwork book, or following information from a website.

Whether you are going to freestyle the quilting stitching (i.e. just stitch as you want) or work from a template, it is a very good idea to draw an accurate scaled-down image of your finished quilt so you will have something visual to refer to as you progress with the quilting. If you are using a template, once you have drawn it, make photocopies of it and lay them across the patchwork to make up the sections of the design, and then machine sew (or hand sew if your patience and skills extend that far) each section in place through the paper and material. Later you can tear away the paper so that you are left with only the material – the paper will come away easily along the sewing line once it’s done.

When you are ready to assemble the layers of the quilt and stitch them together, take your bottom broadcloth or muslin layer and lay it out. Then take your wadding and lay it neatly on top. Then take your patchwork top with the template sections sewn on to it (as a rule of thumb, the top should be smaller all around than the backing and the wadding) and pat it down flat, then pin it to the lower layers in a square grid, working from the centre out. When it’s pinned, start sewing your quilting pattern, again from the centre out, using quilting thread rather than ordinary cotton thread, which is tougher and has a tendency to saw through the quilt over time, leaving gaping holes. When you have finished all the stitching, tear the pieces of paper away to reveal your lovely quilted pattern.

Finishing off the quilt by binding, or edging, is done either by taking a separate strip of fabric and sewing it all the way around the outside, or folding the overcut of the backing and the wadding to the top and sewing it all the way around. As a final little embellishment, embroider a label with your name into a discreet corner for future generations to see, as quilts often become family heirlooms and are handed down for decades, even centuries to come.

Once you start, it does become addictive. Don’t be surprised if you wake up one morning and reach for your patchwork dressing gown, plump up the patchwork cushions on the sofa, shake out the dog’s patchwork bed, all before sucking a thoughtful tooth while looking at your cup of tea and wondering if you should really be using a teapot, and if so whether it would need a patchwork jacket, and nobody’s used one of those for 50 years!

Making rag rugs

Rag rug-making started off as a way of producing floor and bed rugs in times of hardship, such as the beginning of the 1900s and during both world wars, because these rugs are made from cast-off clothing such as old T-shirts, dresses, leggings and maternity wear, basically anything that can be cut into strips – an early form of recycling. Originally the base would have been made from hessian, but most rag ruggers now prefer canvas.

There are lots of different methods of rag rug-making and they can pretty much all be used on the same rug, but the two most popular are pushing and hooking. Pushed rugs are made by taking short scraps of material and prodding each end through the backing from behind using a pointed, but not sharp, tool. By contrast, hooked rugs are worked from the front, and they involve holding strips of fabric behind the canvas and hooking loops of them through to the front in a criss-cross pattern with a large crochet hook or rag rug hook. As each strip is used up, another strip is added to give a continuous long strip.

Once the rug has been completed (whichever method you used to make it), paint the back with latex glue to seal all the ends. When the glue is dry, lay the rug on a backing – something like an old tablecloth or bedspread works well – and trim around the edges, then hand-stitch the backing to the rug. Don’t worry if it looks a little homemade: that’s the look you’re working for. My rag rug has been in front of the fire for two years now with regular washes and still looks fabulous!

Making curtains

Some soft furnishings, such as curtains, need to be taken a bit more seriously. During the 17th and 18th centuries, the government of Britain was desperate to impose some sort of tax on the people, and although they would have loved to levy an income tax, at the time this was felt to be too intrusive into people’s private affairs. In its place they decided to tax the property in which people lived, and set an unpopular charge based upon the number of windows in each house, a window tax, which gave birth to the phrase ‘daylight robbery’. Many people bricked up their windows to avoid the tax, which must have made it very dark and dingy inside, especially as electricity hadn’t been invented then, so the need for pretty curtains to cover the ugly bricked-up gaps must have been high.

Nowadays, the choice of what to hang in our windows is wide: from simple unlined tab-topped curtains to elegant lined goblet-pleated creations. There are also many different styles of blinds, from the classic roller blind to the more challenging Austrian version. You can buy curtains and blinds, of course, but making them is very rewarding and gives immense satisfaction. Walking into a room that has lovely curtains is one thing, but walking into a room that has lovely curtains made by you is quite another.

Curtains aren’t just functional: they’re also a statement. They’re the accent in a room that will make it feel warm and inviting or cold and dull. They can make or break a room. Curtain-making is all about the fabric. There’s the colour to consider, the weight (a heavy or lightweight curtain fabric) and the print: subtle like a moiré watermark or bold and bright. Let the material say something about you and your home.

Because they have such a great impact on a room, changing your curtains allows you to alter the feel of the room whenever you want. Make four sets of curtains and change them with the seasons – not for every room in the house, just the important ones like the bedroom and the sitting room. Swapping curtains might take you a couple of hours, but the impact on a room is as strong as if you’d redecorated, only without all the mess. And changing something so bold is a great way to beat the feeling of being stuck in a rut.

If you want to take your self-sufficiency into the realms of soft furnishings by making your own curtains, arm yourself with a good instruction book and start with something simple. A pair of unlined curtains made from plain fabric is the safest starting point, and from there you can move on to adding linings, then interlinings (to help the curtains drape beautifully and also to act as wonderful insulation) as well as dealing with pattern repeats and matching patterns across widths, and experimenting with the wide range of available headings. Once you start, you’ll be hooked.

As for blinds, you can buy kits for making roller, Roman and Austrian blinds. Again, start with a simple roller blind before experimenting with the more complex Roman or Austrian ones.

MAKING YOUR OWN CLOTHES

From 1964 until 2006, Top of the Pops was one of the highlights of the week for pop-music fans. Hit groups and singers of the day would perform in front of a live audience, and the programmes were broadcast to large television audiences. For many years it was without doubt the trendiest programme on TV, and everyone watched it for the music and the fashion tips because it showed real people dancing to real music. And then this happened …

It was a normal week with a guest list that would justify rolling out the red carpet and popping champagne corks. The bands were giving it their all on the stage and the spectators were dancing and flirting and showing off for all they were worth. Then came a slow song, and to emphasize the change in tempo, the camera took a long, slow sweep across the audience, and there, right in the centre, looking gorgeous, was a lady knitting. And nobody thought that was odd. The coolest, most fashionable place to be in the country, with millions of people watching, and she had taken her knitting. ‘Just doing an arm of this cardi I’ve been working on.’ Presumably when the music sped up and she really got going, she could turn out a jumper, several scarves and a hat all in the space of a three-minute boogie-woogie. Knitting was in.

Now, some decades later, knitting is back in fashion and clothes-making is back on TV, with The Great British Sewing Bee essential viewing. People who can remember their mothers click, click, clicking away with knitting needles or sewing machine find themselves drawn into wool and fabric shops and flicking through pattern books. Babies born in the 21st century are once more spending their early months in hand-knitted booties and peeping out from under warm woollen hats, and the fashion pages of magazines are full of hand-knitted jumpers and cardigans. Forget Granny’s scratchy cardigan, or the awful Christmas jumper brigade: this is sharp and sexy fashion for the 21st century.

Chic, sexy or practical (or all three at once), creating your own fashion by knitting and sewing is a brilliant way to show the world who you really are, and that you’re not simply an ‘off-the-peg’ type of person. Whether you spend your days bumbling around on a farm in jeans and a jumper or you need a smart outfit for the office, it’s perfectly possible to create your own wardrobe.

Knitting

The image of knitting being something done by grannies in rocking chairs does not belong in today’s world, and neither is it a fair representation of women knitting their own high-end fashion right now. The craft of knitting deserves better, and in the hands of the current generation, it seems to be getting respect at last. The end of the 20th century saw a rise in sales of high-street fashion, but as that century gave way to a brand-new one, fashion started to become a little more down to earth again: fewer fantastic and, frankly, unwearable garments – more knitwear and crafty ‘home-styled’ creations. Television picked up on the trend and fanned the fashion flames, with style, designer and home TV shows becoming must-see events. This insight into the minds and methods of fashion designers and style gurus meant that looking good no longer meant having a purse stuffed full of money and a day’s off-the-peg shopping, it meant creating something unique at home … and one way to do that was by knitting.

Knitting involves creating a loop in a continuous length of yarn around the tip of a knitting needle, and using another needle to thread the next loop on to the one before, thereby locking it in place, thus creating material that can be shaped into a garment. If you’re a knitting novice, www.knittinghelp.com is a fabulous site for beginners that shows the knitting basics of long-tail casting on, and plain and purl stitches, which make up the three most important elements of knitting and with which virtually any pattern is then possible. You can knit at home in front of the television, on the train or while you’re waiting for your turn on the Xbox or Wii, anywhere in fact, and when your few spare knitting minutes have run out, you can just put it down ready to pick it up again later. No fuss, no hassle: the perfect pick-up, put-down hobby.

From chunky jackets and slimming skirts to beanie hats, funky gloves and beautiful lingerie, knitted clothes are the perfect dress-up or dress-down outfit for occasions from a garden party to mucking out a horse; and, if the wool has been spun with a fleece from your own sheep, they are the epitome of self-sufficiency.

To knit, you need knitting needles and some material to knit with. Traditionally this would have been wool, but there are many recycled alternatives, such as T-shirt or silk sari material, which you simply strip cut, starting at the bottom and working your way around and up in one running cut so you end up with a continuous strand, and then knit in the usual way. Although T-shirt material is mainly recycled into rag rugs (see page 186), it can also work for short jackets or long skirts. Other unusual materials are banana fibre; rabbit, goat, yak or cat hair; plastic bin liners (strip cut as you would a T-shirt) or even old video tape!

The most common misconception of knitting is that once you start you end up with dozens and dozens of scarves. Not true: once you start you end up with dozens and dozens of socks instead. Life could be worse. Yet once the complexities and subtleties begin to sink in, the transition from socks to everything else is swift. A competent knitter can easily turn their hand to most patterns – and there are patterns available for most things.

Whilst it’s true that knitting is a way of having beautiful things to wear that may be financially out of your grasp otherwise, knitting is equally about individuality, about making a statement. Whether you’re dressing up a knitwear top with a flirty skirt or dressing it down with a pair of old favourite jeans, the result is the same: you made it, you love it, and nobody else in the world has one the same.

Dressmaking

The difference between dressmaking (I use the term in its general sense to cover all forms of making clothes from fabric, including tailoring) and knitting is that with knitting you are starting from scratch and creating the material for the garment, whereas dressmaking begins with finding the right fabric for the clothes you want to make. Another interesting difference between knitting and dressmaking is that traditionally, tailoring was once seen as a male profession, whereas even today, fewer men knit than women.

Note that if you are going to take up dressmaking, a sewing machine is pretty much a must. Yes, you could stitch everything by hand, but the results will never be as good, and there are only so many hours in the day. So buy a good, lightweight machine (not one that is so heavy that you can’t lift it on and off the table without risk of serious injury) and get sewing.

There are hundreds of different fabrics, many of which are suitable for dressmaking, including cotton, leather, Lycra, denim, silk and satin. Hunting for the right fabric (the right colour, the right texture), maybe combining fabrics that complement each other, and choosing a stylish pattern is what dressmaking is all about. Whether it’s making a simple top or creating a complete outfit, the fabric is where it begins and ends. For ideas, inspiration and guidance on what to do, and how to do it, check out www.burdastyle.com/creations, which showcases everyday people creating high-end fashion in their own homes.

Dressmaking, or at least dress-mending, also plays an important part in self-sufficiency. As our mothers and grandmothers were well aware, the ability to patch up and repair clothes, to make do and mend, makes the household income go further and avoids (or at least delays) the buying of new clothes.

Tote bags

In self-sufficiency we love items that are multipurpose, and tote bags are a perfect example. The same bag can be used in the morning for collecting eggs, lunchtime as a reusable shopping bag, afternoon stuffed with all the kids’ bits and pieces, evening to collect the washing from the line and as an over-the-shoulder bag on a night out.

For a bag 40 × 30cm/16 × 12in, cut your chosen fabric 84 × 32cm/33 × 12½in. Fold the material in half widthways. At the top where the opening will be, fold a hem of 1cm/½in outwards, pin and sew on both sides. Next, mark a line down each side 1cm/½in in, and pin and sew. For the handles, select a material that won’t stretch and cut two lengths 44cm × 6cm/17 × 2½in, folding them lengthways in half, pinning and sewing 1cm/½in in from the edge. Turn each inside out before sewing equidistant along each side of the top. To finish, turn the whole bag inside out to have the neat side outermost.

Jeans slippers

In the self-sufficient world, looking after yourself is one of the top priorities. If you’re cold, if you’re uncomfortable or miserable, then you won’t be able to work as effectively as you might like. Whatever else self-sufficiency is about, it is not about suffering. In fact, to get the most out of you and your day, it’s quite the reverse, so spending time making yourself a pair of comfortable slippers is well within the game plan.

There are many slipper designs, from Native American moccasins to fleece memory foam, but for self-sufficiency, preference is always given to repurposing and recycling, and for this you’d go a long way to beat a pair of slippers made from an old pair of jeans.

We’re going to need the back pockets, so to start with lay your jeans on the floor and make sure each of your feet fit in each of the pockets. Once you’re happy they do, take a pair of sharp scissors and cut out the pockets, retaining the integrity of the pockets so you still have the front and back – in effect, they’re still a pocket, just removed from the jeans.

Next, stand on a piece of paper and carefully draw around the outside of each foot so the shape on the paper is about 1cm/½in bigger than your actual foot. Cut out your shapes and lay them on legs of your jeans, drawing around them with a black marker pen. Cut out both shapes and put in two separate piles; left and right. Now do the same again so you have two of each.

Using exactly the same paper templates, once again draw around the outside of left and right feet on some thin foam (if you don’t have foam you can use a couple of sheets of stiff cardboard/leather/base of a flip-flop/cutout from an old thick woolly jumper, etc.), adding each to the piles of left and right jeans cut-outs. Now make a sandwich of each left and right foot cut-outs with the foam in the middle and a jeans section top and bottom, sewing carefully all around the outside.

Take your previously cut-out pockets and slip left and right bases into a pocket each, sewing all the way around the outside to secure.

Facemasks

Flu, colds and especially viruses can be nasty. When out in public, many of us are now wearing cloth facemasks to help protect ourselves at times when we feel at risk. The United States’ CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) recommends the following homemade facemask.

Choose tightly woven cotton and cut two oblongs 25 × 15cm/10 × 6in. Carefully lay one on top of the other, and fold down a 1cm/½in hem on the long sides and sew. Now do the same down on the shorter sides. Thread a length of elastic/hair band/string inside the hem of each shorter side creating ear loops.

NATURAL DYES

The synthetic fabric dyes available commercially can be disappointing and a bit samey, not to mention toxic, and more and more people are developing allergies to these commercial colourings, which can make clothes feel itchy, and, at worst, can lead to blotchy irritated skin. Not nice. Yet the crazy thing is that we are surrounded by natural dyeing plants, spices and berries that will colour clothes with more vibrancy and depth than any shop-bought equivalent. If you live more than a minute away from the shops you will probably pass half a dozen different dyeing ingredients growing wild, and available for free, along your journey.

NATURAL DYES
Colour	Plant
Red and pink	Cranberries, dandelion root, raspberries, red onion skin
Orange	Beetroot, dahlias, heather, marigolds
Yellow	Field mushrooms, nettles, St John’s wort, saffron, turmeric
Brown	Cinnamon, onion skin, tea bags, walnut husks
Dark brown	Gypsywort, hawthorn berries
Green	Foxglove, grass clippings, lily-of-the-valley, nettles, sorrel
Blue	Cornflower, wild pansy

All you need to do is collect the plants or berries – adding different ingredients together will heighten or lower the shade and tone – and put them in a large pan (not one you might cook in afterwards). Add some alum (a stabilizer available from most chemists) to set the colour, water and the fabric you want to dye, and bring the whole lot up to boiling point, then turn off the heat and let it cool gently for anywhere between a couple of hours to a whole day. The longer you leave the fabric steeping, the richer and darker the colour will be.

There are no formulae, as different plants picked from different spots at different times of the year will each produce a shade that is either darker or lighter, so it really is a case of playing around: adding and taking away until you get something you like. One trick, however, if you find the colour very dark is to add a capful of white wine vinegar to lighten the shade. This works especially well with the berries and takes away a lot of the darkness, bringing out more of their natural reds.

Once the right colour has been reached, take the material out and wash it in clean, warm water and hang it out to dry. This method of dyeing is perfect for shirts and blouses, tablecloths and curtains – indeed, for most fabrics, including off-cuts for patchwork and quilting and even wool for knitting.