Kitchen Accessories

How can I describe our kitchen? It’s certainly one of the main things that attracted me to our house, with a large dining area and two sets of patio doors leading out to the garden. The room is light and airy. In the summer, the garden really does become an extension to our living space and as soon as we come downstairs in the morning I open up the doors for the boys to play in and out all day.

The actual kitchen units were put in when the house was built ten years ago, so it is a bit dated and I’d love to get a whole new kitchen. As it stands though, it’s perfectly useable and I think I might save that project until we eventually move into our ‘forever home’, which certainly won’t be for the next couple of years! The units are a honey coloured wood and the tiles are shades of terracotta.

As a little project, I’ve put together some kitchen accessories to match the decor. So far I’ve done a decorative blind, window valances, teatowels, oven glove and a kitchen organiser. I’ve still to do a table runner and ironing board cover in the matching fabric, but if you have any other ideas for creative kitchen accessories that I can make, please let me know! I’ve included some photos here and a quick ‘how to’ for the kitchen organiser, just in case you want to have a go at something similar.

I wanted to pick a fabric that would match the terracotta colour scheme and managed to pick up two complementary fabrics on special offer at last year’s Ideal Home Exhibition. The first is ‘Sophia’ and the second is ‘Cervino‘ both from Voyage Decoration. I absolutely love Voyage fabrics, they’re good quality and have some lovely design collections. These two work well together as I’ve used the bolder fabric on prominent items such as the window treatments and the more detailed fabric on smaller accessories such as the teatowels. What do you think?

I know I’m not the only person who does this (really, my friends have admitted it too!), but several accessories in my kitchen are DPO, that is, Display Purposes Only! I found my father-in-law (very kindly) doing the washing up with one of my new tea towels last weekend and had to explain to him calmly that they were not ACTUALLY to be used for drying things! Yes, I think he thought I was bonkers too…

Kitchen Organiser 

You will need: Ready made picture frame with glass removed, magnetic memo board (removed from its frame & cut to size if necessary), a sheet of cork (cut to size), fabric, ribbon, drawing pins or decorative brads, glue, wadding. You can pick up all these things from somewhere like Hobbycraft without spending too many pennies.

1. Using the cardboard backing from the picture frame as a base, glue the magnetic memo board in the top right corner and the cork across the bottom.

2. Glue wadding in the top left corner and then place the fabric over the top, glueing the edges underneath the cork and memo board to seal into position.

3. To hide the rough edges, glue ribbon along each component of the noticeboard. For a pretty touch, add bows of ribbon and secure with drawing pins/decorative brads or simply glue on.

4. On top of the fabric, place strips of ribbon at diagonal opposites to form a grid. Then, using decorative brads or plain gold drawing pins, push through each intersection and around the edge, in order to secure to the cardboard base.

5. Finally, snap the frame onto the cardboard backing, securing the different elements of the noticeboard into position. I also added some cute butterfly magnets, made by Parlane.