Whether starting from seeds or seedlings bought from a nursery, Growing chilies at home is so simple that even if you don’t ‘do it properly’ you will still probably end up with a great crop of delicious fiery peppers. Not just the bog standard varieties either. You can enjoy exotic

I had a go at making some finger rings out of scrapwood and was stunned with the high quality results. It really is an easy task to turn scrap into objects of beauty and value using only very simple tools. The technique is simply to take a shaving from a

Nettles are nasty stinging weeds and we all hate them. Except that they are also a fantastic for turning into nettle beer which gets you trousered is easy to make and tastes utterly delicious. For these reasons I have to say that I think nettles are wonderful plants that should

If you’re thinking of buying a new garden sofa you could well be looking at spending over £1000 for anything half decent. Why not create something that is both totally bespoke and more solid than anything you can buy in the shops or online. By making your own sofa from

Your hobby can make you money. Some people get lucky and become millionaires. Others just make a few extra quid doing what they were doing anyway. Now I cannot promise you millions, but with surprisingly little effort you can definitely make a decent wodge of extra cash. How much you make is

When breaking up wooden pallets you will always get a few short boards and a few split boards. But even these seemingly useless pieces can be turned into wonderful things. Making a bird box from old scraps of pallets is easy, but the reward of seeing a pair of finches

A wood fire is a thing of wonder but popping down the local park with an axe for firewood is frowned on by the local council so we generally have to buy logs, which can cost a bit over the course of a cold winter.  However newspapers are made from

We call them power drills but that is a hangover from grandad’s day when hand cranked drills were still in common use. Some people (woodworkers mostly) still use those little hand powered drills for fine quality work, but to those artisans I say, “thanks for keeping the old ways going

Anyone who has a hobby of building websites eventually needs a list of things within easy reach, without any formatting attached. We need these lists to check our code with (especially when building arrays).  So, this is really just a page to make my life a little easier. If it

Here are some of my first experiments with embossing on thin metal sheet. I actually used an aluminium soda can. I wanted to give it a try because there are no fancy tools needed to get started. You really do have everything you need lying around the house. Firstly using