Kitchen cabinet curtain DIY

To make this I used about .75 metres of printed cotton, 2 metres of elastic, and two suction hook thingys which you can buy here in packs of 12 for £1.99.

So I live in my granny's old house that my dear mama owns and renovated a few years back. When it came to designing the new kitchen, my mum (being a chronic food hoarder in the way that most mothers seem to be) decided to put about five thousand cabinets in it.

Trouble is, my kitchen is literally completely fucking lined with cupboards, except this one little gap, which we have tastefully filled in with saucepans and spare chairs. Looks cute right? 

First I measured my 'gap' that I wanted to cover with the curtain. It was about 60 inches across and 35 inches down. You'll need to add a bit extra for side and bottom hems (add 1 inch both length and width) and for the channel for the elastic at the top (add 2 inches). So I needed a 61 x 38 inch rectangle.

Sew half inch folded over hems along the bottom and sides of the rectangle first. Then sew a fully inch folded over hem along the top to thread the elastic through. It's helpful if you attach the end to a safety pin and then thread that through.

Helpfully illustrated with the above photograph.

Then all that's left to do is attach the ends of the elastic to the hooks on the sucker things, and stick them to either side of the gap.

And now nobody needs to see my rusty saucepans and half drunk bottles of amaretto. Victory!

Handbag rail DIY

Argos clothes rail - £7.99

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Wilko shower curtain rings - 98p

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Easy handbag rail.

Spray painting the fuck out of a bunch of shit

So there are a few bits and pieces I've been meaning to spray paint for a while now.  Mainly because spray painting is literally the funnest kind of painting you can do. The least funnest kind of painting, if you're interested, is varnishing or staining wood, especially if you're required to sand it first. Eugggghhh so terrible. 

I originally bought this cute teeny tiny chrome paint for £3.45 from Wilko, but definitely don't buy this unless you only want to paint like one thing because this will last about twenty seconds.

This one is more expensive at £4.95 (also from Wilko) but it's a million times bigger and literally exactly the same as the small posh sort. Don't let the shitty colour on the cap fool you, it's awesome.

As I said I had a bunch of stuff that I wanted to paint but it was mainly a mirror, a waste paper basket, and a bunch of plastic storage boxes. Lets start with the mirror since it was the biggest pain in the arse as it was the only one that required preparation of any sort.

I bought this mirror for £5 in a charity shop when I was about 17, and I've been lugging it around with me ever since. The frame was cream when I got it, but because I've moved house about 10 times since then, it's all chipped and scuffed and looks like shit.

Ideally you want to use masking tape and newspaper to cover the mirror part of your mirror if you're going to paint the frame, unless your fancy pants frame detaches from the mirror, in which case definitely do that and save yourself some hassle. 

Anyway I didn't have masking tape or newspaper in my house, so I used regular sellotape and old copies of Heat magazine. It worked pretty much the same, except the sellotape was harder to get off the mirror afterwards. P.S. Please don't judge me for reading Heat magazine.

And here it is afterwards, lookin all fly. And in case you were wondering, yes, that is a pink unicorn onesie hanging next to it.

Next was the waste paper basket, here it is before I painted it. I was originally aiming to go for a kind of ombre look, but as you can see it came out terrible and I had to paint the entire thing.

It's the worst!

Not quite so terrible!

Here it is looking futuristic as fuck in the corner of my bedroom like a robots lav.

Lastly we have the storage boxes. See those ugly as hell blue and green boxes under the sofa? Those were the ones I wanted to paint. The blue ones weren't *too* bad, but the green ones looked fucking grim. When I was 18, I spent a night in Reflex drinking pitchers of this luminous green cocktail probably called 'The Hulk' or something equally moronic. Anyway, the next morning my shit was the exact same shade of green as those storage baskets. That morning was pretty hungover and terrible, so it's not something I particularly want to be reminded of on a daily basis 7 years later. I only bought them because they were cheap as fuck from Wilkos, being £2.50 and £2.00 for multi-packs. Time to paint that shit.

The paint came out really nice on the plastic actually, and it was all shiny like tinfoil. I'm still sort of paranoid that it's going to chip off, but I had a good go with a fingernail and it seems pretty permanent.

Here they are being all metal-y and looking cool against my black rug.

So find yourself something to spray paint that isn't a brick wall, yeah?

Glue the thing to the other thing DIY part 2

I've still been trying to figure out what the fuck to do with the rest of the 100 plastic daisies I drunk-bought on amazon a while ago. Seriously, even after this I still have at least 70, I might have to start sticking them to lampposts or something just to get rid of the little fuckers. 

But anyway I had this plain black frame lurking around my house for ages that I'm 99% sure is from IKEA because I love IKEA and buy everything there. I've been using it to hold a picture of me and my friends back before life repeatedly punched us in the face.

So the frame is fine, but just a bit boring really. Time to glue some shit to that other shit. I used this very high tech, state of the art £4.43 glue gun from Amazon, and the plastic daisies I spoke about before.

If you start with the corners and then divide the sides into sections before filling in, you're much more likely to get evenly spaced daisies.

Easy right? I love how 90's it is, considering that photo was taken in 1998, and that inexplicably 90's stuff is super fashionable now. Does that make me fashionable? For being actually alive in a coherent, memory forming way during the 90's? Probably that makes me less cool and fashionable actually. 

Whatever, bitches. Peace out.

IKEA Decor Maths

RAMSTA diamond string lights - £12

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BRYNE net bed canopy - £7.50

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Ultra-fem sex tent.

You don't know what you're missing when you don't have a sex tent.

Easy button-less zip-less cushion cover DIY

Listen, I think we can all agree that buttons and zips are a pain in the arse to sew. They're just super fiddly and annoying and I always manage to cock it up. I guess I'm just not that good at sewing. 

Whatever. Who cares. Don't judge me.

For this DIY all you need is about half a metre of fabric, a square cushion insert, and the ability to cut and sew in a straight line. Piece of piss right?

I used £1.35 cushion inserts from Wilkinson's, and the ridiculously named named margareta fabric I got when I was at IKEA last week. I bought 0.6 metres for £4.20 thinking that it would be enough to cover the two cushion inserts I'd bought. But of course it fucking wasn't. I was about four inches short lengthways. But you know, that's life I guess. Full of disappointment.

Okay, so the first thing to do is measure whatever cushion insert you're using, then basically cut out a rectangle the following size:

Length = (size of cushion) + 4 cm

Width = (size of cushion) x 2 + 14 cm 

My Wilko one was 40 cm, therefore:

Length = 40 + 4 = 44

Width = 40 x 2 + 14 = 94

So my fabric needed to be a 44 cm x 94 cm rectangle. Get it?

You should be able to wrap your fabric around the cushion with an overlap. 

Then you need to give the edges of the length a 2 cm hem.

Here is mine all pinned and that. Sew that shit up bro.

Next you turn the fabric inside-out, and fold it over so the lengths overlap by 10 cm. Sew both sides, turn it the right way out, and that's it. It's like a pillowcase so you don't need any fastenings.

Here's the back

The front

And ready for impromptu naps on my tiny sofa.

Black stars lampshade DIY

I would apologise for not posting in a while, but I've been sick so go fuck yourself.

I customised an IKEA paper lampshade ages ago, but it's getting tatty as shit and those plain white lampshades cost like nothing. Seriously anybody who pays more than a fiver for a lampshade is a fucking moron. This DIY only requires a lampshade, tissue paper, scissors and glue. Just like Pritt stick or whatever will do.

This regolit lampshade is £2.25 from IKEA. Side note: if I was a designer for IKEA I would name all the furniture rude shit in Swedish. I just looked it up, and boobs in Swedish is bröst, which I think we can all agree would be a great name for a dining room set.

Here it is in all it's pre-customised glory.

I drunk-bought this stack of tissue paper ages ago on Amazon (god damn you one-click purchase) for fuck knows what. You can get it here but to be honest I didn't even use 10% of what I had so it's probably not worth buying this set specifically unless you can think of some other shit to do with it. And if you do, please let me know because I'm a chronic hoarder and I'll probably own this until the day I die unless I think of something to do with it.

I wanted black stars (because I still haven't grown out of my rocker phase) so I used a white pencil to draw some on the paper so I could cut out a bunch at the same time. But I mean you could cut whatever shape you wanted. I even thought pretty seriously about doing red hearts instead, but my light bulb is red and my room is super girly anyway, and you know, I want to get laid at some point in the future. And not by someone with a Lolita fixation.

Wooooo stars. When I had them all cut out I just glued them onto the lampshade. If you're using different sized stars (or whatever shape you went with - I hope it was a penis shape!) I'd recommend doing the bigger ones first and then fill in the gaps with smaller ones. It's paper-on-paper so should stick pretty easily, but you might need to re do the corners and stuff.

Also, unless you're a fucking giant, bear in mind that you'll be mainly look at this from below and not from the side which is probably how you're looking at it when you're sticking the little buggers on.

There you go, piece of piss right?