Category Make

Homemade laundry detergents are more sustainable, better for your health and significantly less expensive than store-bought options. Not surprisingly, commercially available laundry products aim to do two things well in order to attract returning customers. They’re designed to get…

Successful seed germination requires three important things: warmth, light and moisture. With some recycled timber, you can create the perfect seed-raising environment. As we wait for the soil to warm up this time of year, there are many places around our homes well suited to raising seeds for spring planting. The goal is finding a place which is nice and warm to promote germination and protect your young seedlings from the elements, but still with plenty of light to guide the new shoots to the surface.

By using oils and fats readily available, soap can be made at home free from synthetic fragrances and colours and can be used to wash everything from your hair and body to household dishes.

Kimchi is a spicy fermented side dish traditionally made as a way to preserve vegetables for harsh Korean winters. These days, its significant health benefits have made it popular in many other cultures.

If you’ve got a bountiful harvest of citrus to squeeze, you don’t need to mess around with fiddly squeezers or noisy and expensive electric appliances. There’s nothing quite as satisfying as being able to make something at home that produces just as good – if not better – results than a store-bought appliance. And being able to make it from bits and pieces you’re likely to have lying around is the lemon icing on your homemade cake.

This long, enclosed and wearable towel is the perfect project to give new life to tired towels. Great for coming straight home from the pool or the beach without getting changed and ideal for when you need to discreetly change out of your bathers somewhere public. Treat you or your family with a practical addition to the beach bag this summer that will both reduce waste and save you money. Using the towels from the back of your cupboard, or some bright-coloured or patterned towels picked up in an op shop, this wearable beach towel means the kids can stay in the water for longer. And with enough room to be able to get changed within it, accidentally exposing yourself is a thing of the past.

When it comes to fermented drinks, most people think kombucha or water kefir, but good old-fashioned ginger beer can be just as beneficial for gut health and really easy to make yourself. It might seem unintuitive, but the link between fermentation and good health is bacteria. And they’re everywhere, from the start of a fermentation process to the insides of your stomach, and responsible not only for digesting things inside our intestines, but things outside them, too. Not content with breaking down our food for digestion, bacteria reduces it into molecules more easily absorbed by our bodies: this is called bioavailability. Besides that, the microbial community makes vitamins, breaks up toxins and medicines, and strengthens our immune systems. All things which are a great advantage for our health and wellbeing.

For the love of good cutlery, we all need a hand-carved Swedish butter knife in our lives. And the best thing is you can carve your own smörkniv from trees growing in your garden. Hand-carved butter knives are strong, sturdy and a work of art. They range from simple, elegant forms through to animal-shaped spreaders with matching dishes. They’re relatively simple things to make with a few low-tech tools and you probably won’t need to go any further than your garden to gather all the materials you’ll need.

Steeking may not only revolutionise the way you knit, but it also offers a great way to upcycle or reconstruct knitted garments, tailor them to your needs, and save them from landfill or eternal damnation in your darning pile.