The Homemade Home for Children

Following on from her fabulous book, The Homemade Home, Sania Pell has written The Homemade Home for Children, a beautifully produced publication with 50 child-friendly projects for parents to make for their children. There are also projects suitable for kids to make themselves.


The book is lavishly illustrated with colour photographs of the finished items and line drawings of the steps involved. Interspersed between the main projects are Quick Ideas - projects that can be done with a minimum of time and effort - such as pictures made from children's handprints.


There are ideas for personalising kids bedrooms, easy to make dressing up projects, jewellery made from buttons, vintage dolls and felt brooches - a cornucopia of ideas to delight your children. You can make your kids a garden playhouse using remnant fabric and your clothes line. Sania also makes good use of found objects, remnants and oddments, such as making a sail boat from an old tin bath, a dolls' house from an old bookcase and storage boxes from old suitcases. So the ideas in here aren't going to cost you a lot of money. 

This book would also make a fantastic gift for any creatively minded parent or grandparent.  
The Homemade Home for Children

Clare F

We've finished the shoots for our new book

It's been harder work than we thought - so many things to make and all the step-by-steps to be done, but we're pleased to say "It's a wrap folks!"

The last of our total 6 days of still photography was on location down in Dorset, after 3 days at Hilary's and 2 day's at mine (Clare F). We're really excited about the book, although publication date still seems a long way away - not till October. Sian the photographer and her assistant Nick have done us proud and we're sure you're going to agree when the book's published.

In case you didn't know what the format is - it's (very imaginatively!) called Make it and Mend it and is full of projects for the whole year season by season - including a section on special occasions such as Easter and Mother's Day. All kinds of things for you to make and mend are included, from sewing a quilt from old sweatshirts to making chocolate truffles.

We'd expected the shooting was going to be a doddle - as most of the projects were ones we had already featured on the site - but most of them had to be tweaked and twiddled and generally re-made from scratch so we've been very busy bees.

Watch this space for more news.

Clare F

We're writing a book

Our Make it and Mend it book will be coming out next September. Yee-ha! It seems a long way away but there's so much to do. We're all really excited and we're going to be very busy between now and then getting everything ready and meeting our publisher's deadlines - as well as carrying on with 'business as usual'.

We're very lucky to be working with a fabulous publishing team at FW Media.We had the kick off planning meeting yesterday - and planned the whole book page by page. It's giving us a fascinating insight into how publishers work.

Everyone in the MIAMI team is involved. We  have copy to write ready for the first photo shoot not to mention getting lots of making and mending projects ready. "Right - that's enough slacking - get on with it!" (Ed)