The lost art of the pillow box

With all these wonderful papercraft tools it can be easy to overlook the basic pillow box for those little (in size, not necessarily value) gifts.

Rescue a humble empty loo roll or paper towel tube from recycling, flatten it lightly and cover it with your choice of lightweight paper- wet glue is fine if it doesn’t soak your chosen paper. (Some people sterilise their tubes in the microwave before crafting with them)

Take a round object, such as the tape roll shown here. Lay it so you can score an arc from side to side of the tube on each ‘side’ of the flattened tube and at each end, four scores in all.

Gently push each scored arc towards the middle to create the pillow effect.

Decorate and maybe add a tag to finish.

Flavoured salts

Flavoured salts lift simple recipes, they avoid waste by preserving herbs and fruit, they look great and are easy to make. Why not? Here are two ‘no weigh, use what you have’ versions.

For the rosemary and orange version the rosemary leaves were stripped from 5 long stalks ( I am keeping the stalks as kebab sticks). I peeled an ancient mandarin/satsuma that was lurking in the bottom of the fruit bowl, squeezed the juice over the rosemary, scraped the pith from the peel then chopped the peel into slices. The rosemary and orange peel was blitzed with about three tablespoons of coarse salt using the chopping attachment on my stick blender (I usually use it for making breadcrumbs).

Just a few seconds of blitzing produced a kaleidoscope of coloured salt. The mix was spread on a silicone baking sheet and dried in a low oven for about 30 minutes before storing in recycled herb jars.

The basil version was even easier. Once the basil leaves were blitzed into 3 tablespoons of salt I spread the lovely green mix on a silicone sheet and dried it in a low temp oven for about 30 minutes. I sprinkled dried chili flakes in before storing in glass jars. So pretty.

Try rubbing into chicken before you roast it, over boiled new potatoes or other plain veg, over sliced tomatoes …

Leather bag – from a kit

Simple Way Heidi Rucksack

Lovely, quality leather bag sewn by me! OK, the pieces were all cut out with stitch holes and foolproof instructions. Nevertheless I feel creative pride in making this birthday gift into something I will use and enjoy for years and years.

I would definitely make another bag from Simple Way; just musing over the catalogue…