Progress on Gooseberry Cottage Kitchen

Did some more 'bits & pieces'

I've been working on accessories for the kitchen and it's starting to look more 'lived in' now.  It all looked too bland around the top of the upper cupboards so I started there by adding some colour.  At first I wanted to make an Arnotts biscuit tin - Arnotts is an iconic Australlian brand of biscuits and has a great picture of an Eastern Rosella, one of our colourful parrots, as it's trademark picture. People often have decorative tins on top of their cupboards and I thought that an 'antique' tin would look nice.  I googled images of their biscuit tins and made printies but ended up not having enough room up there after all, so I'll keep it for something else.  

A nice place gave a touch of red contrast so that was next.  And two containers are actually little bits retrieved from the motherboard of a computer - have no idea what they are.  But painted green and with a bit of floral printie around them, they fill the space nicely.

There were enough leaves left over from the philodendron that I made in the hanging pot for the pergola (see the post 'The competition that wasn't) to make another smaller plant, and I put it in a plastic pot which I painted green.  I must say it looks rather as though it is reaching out to grab the plate that is also on top of the cabinets vbg.

The space above the fridge still looked bare so I made a small shelf to go in there and printed off some covers of cookbooks to sit on the shelf.  One of them is the Australian Womens Weekly Cookbook - another common Aussie kitchen iicon, and the one at the right hand side, obscured by the light, is the Commonsense Cookbook.  I had to have that one, as a nod to my first ever cookbook in Grade 7 - the first and only year I did cooking at school, before our grade was divided up and I was made to do Chemistry and Physics instead.

On the bench there is one of the set of 3 chopping boards I bought from......, and an 'electric kettle' that isn't in the photos because I forgot to put it in.  It is really a metal kettle with the knob sanded off then painted green, with a black strip down one side to mimic a cordless kettle.

I made the kettle after spending a long time this evening assembling a coffee machine from a kit by..... It is one of five kitchen utensils and I am really impressed with the result.  But after making it I found it was too tall to fit between the cupboards. 

The table between the kitchen bench and the sink unit is a kitchen worktable kit by.....I am really pleased with how this turned out too.

The oven mitt on the Aga and the one hanging on the fireplace are printies.  The little mat on the floor in front of the fireplace is also a printie.  the cat dish on the mat is made from Creative PaperClay left over from making the cat basket that is tucked in between the fireplace and the wall - look carefully and you can just see it.  The cat dish is filled with 'cat food' made from a bit of broken terracotta flower pot that I ground into tiny pieces!

It looks so nice with all the rest of the lights off and just the light on in the kitchen - really cosy.  I have tried and tried to make Peter's camera take a decent photo of the room with the light on but the flash keeps going off and making the scene bright.  However I will keep trying to work it out to show you.