DIY Play Kitchen.

Here is a little play kitchen I whipped up for the little lady for Christmas 2011. That Christmas, aged three she asked Father Christmas for a little kitchen, like her friend Imogen owned. Now have you seen how much play kitchens are?? Shocking. I was going to settle on this Ikea number and pimp it up, as it was the cheapest of the bunch, but at £90, I just could not inflict such prices upon poor old Santa. So after a little Google inspiration, I decided to make one myself, like you do 5 days prior to Christmas, with at that point very limited making skills plus with an 11 month old who did not ever sleep, seriously NEVER. Not the most genius of ideas this close to Christmas, let's just say we didn't get much sleep that week, but it was worth it. So the following is the kitchen I (OK we) whipped up and how it was made, it sits slap bang in the middle of our real life, fully functional kitchen and I think it is played with pretty much every single day, by the little lady and now the little chap too. I never took photos before, and these were taken yesterday, I think it is in pretty good nick considering it is a year and a half old, and I made it, go me. Woop.

Bookshelf.

The kitchen was made using this bookshelf from Argos. We had owned this for many a year and it had been sitting waiting to be driven to the local charity furniture shop, so it was a no brainer really to use it.

Rejig it.

The shelves required a spot of cutting/ inserting/ general rejiggery, hopefully the image makes sense. This is where King Kwak came in, sawing it by hand in the garden in the cold at midnight, our neighbours must of loved us that week. It was too tall so the top shelf came off, the back plate shifted down. Two shelves removed, and using one of these shelves we cut it and slotted two pieces in below to separate the spaces. Original image courtesy of Argos.

Worktop. 
This is a piece of MDF, cut and sanded. The hole was cut using a jigsaw to fit the trendy stainless steel sink, aka a lunchbox off of Poundland. The MDF was covered in wood grain sticky back plastic (true Blue Peter stylee) £5 from Wilkinson, and I screwed on four knobs, which were 50p at the time from Ikea. The eagle eyed among you may have noticed the sever lack of a tap. First thing the little lady spotted on Christmas morning dammit, but at the time to buy a tap would have cost the same price as the whole thing so I put it on my list of things to do in the future, which needless to say may never happen. She hasn't mentioned it since. The whole piece was then screwed into place.

Paint it. 

The paint was a grey Dulux shade, leftover from my bedroom. Once painted I attached 8 screw hooks to the underside of the top shelf, to hold all of the cooking utensils and pans.

Reverse. 

The bookshelf had no back. We got a piece of hardboard, cut and lightly sanded it. I glued wallpaper on, using wallpaper paste. The wallpaper is leftovers again, from the little ladies bedroom. I attached a layer of transparent sticky back plastic over the wallpaper so it would last and nailed the whole thing onto the back of the bookshelf. The frame was from Ikea, I photoshopped up a little Koco's Kitchen image, and attached the whole frame to the back hardboard, that frame, he is never coming off.

The Doors. 

This kitchen is ultra modern and houses an oven plus a microwave, luxury. The doors were cut from the same hardboard as the reverse, lightly sanded and painted. Transparent perspex was attached behind using No more nails. The handles are from Ikea, £3 for the two, and the doors were hung using little silver hinges.

Perspex. 

You will have spotted we have a bit of custom Perspex laser printing going on. This came free courtesy of Kings Kwak's mate. If you don't have a mate with similar tools this would I guess cost a fair bit, but a similar effect could be created using MDF and paint. The Perspex we have is for the hobs: black and red discs with hob like lines and 'Kocos hob' laser printed on. Further perspex is on the oven and microwave doors, with relevant: dials, buttons, timers and again my daughters name printed upon. My husband did this as a surprise, which was a lovely touch.

Sides. 

To utilise every square millimetre of the bookshelf, the sides feature upon the left: A blackboard menu to display the days culinary delights. And to the right: I popped on some sticky chrome effect hooks, about £2 from Homebase for 2, which store all the essential cleaning apparatus a girl could need. Super handy for my little chap now as he has developed a little cleaning OCD, which is marvellous for me, bless him.

Sewing. 

Now this is what took the time, had me up till silly hours and gave me a sore thumb. First I moseyed on down to John Lewis to buy the fabrics, the floral came first with the others picked to match. I bought the fabrics in 25cm lengths, plus a few buttons and I already owned the ric rac and ribbon. All together the fabric supplies only cost about £10. First I made a little tiered frilled curtain to cover the cupboards, I attached pom pom trim to the bottom of the layers and it is held on using ric rac. Then I made the above for the little lady to wear and use whilst playing. King Kwak's aunt crocheted the dishcloth and I made the bunting out of all the scraps, plus ric rac and buttons and attached the finished piece to the top shelf.

Cupboards:

The little tiered curtain conceals the cupboard space, which stores her crockery/ kitchen supplies.

Cooking.

A close up of inside the oven and microwave. There is a proper authentic oven tray, off of some mango packaging, and the microwave has a actual rotating plate, which was the lid from the sink/ lunchbox, nailed into place.

Top Chef:

She loves it as you can see, she is looking ever so lovely and getting much better at this camera posing I feel.

On the Menu:

And this is what she was cooking up yesterday, some sushi which has to be the best play set they have ever been given. Toy sushi, amazing.

Cost: All in all this play kitchen cost roughly £28.
Supplies: Lots, all mentioned above.

Time taken: Several hours, at a guess I would say roughly 14 hours. Maybe more.

So the £28 price tag is a huge difference to the £90 Ikea play kitchen, granted it took a while and it does not make kitchen cooking noises, but maybe that is something I could look into, or I could make such noises myself every time she plays with it? We were very happy with the results and most importantly the little lady really does love it so it was all worthwhile. Just to point out, the cooking utensils and all other accessories do not feature within the £28, they have all been collected since, mostly as presents for the different occasions since. 

So what do you think? I hope you like it, any comments/ suggestions would be greatly received. Have you made a play kitchen? If you had been planning to buy one, then I definitely would recommend giving it a try.

Queen Kwak is now on Twitter.

Queen Kwak is now on Twitter and I am now officially a twit. You will have to bear with me as I am very new to Twitter and to be honest I have not got the foggiest what I am doing there, I do not even know what the icons below the messages are and am as yet too scared to press them. But Fear not, I shall persevere and try to tweet regularly about this blog, life and my work. I earlier tweeted a gem of a 4.5 year olds first attempts at joke telling, she is comedy gold. So please do come over, pop in to say hi. You can follow me here, I look forward to twittering with you soon. 

Queen Kwak is now on Pinterest.

Queen Kwak is now on Pinterest, please click here to follow me. I have a slight Pinterest addiction, it gets everyone in the end. I used to dabble from time to time, but now I am a fully fledged Pinterest crazy addict. Any spare moment of time, I find myself pinning. Waiting for the kettle to boil, pin it. Waiting for two babies to finish their dinner, pin it. In the bath, pin it. Too much info? Sorry. If you would care to follow me then please do so here, I look forward to becoming pinning buddies with you soon.

Queen Kwak is now on Facebook.

Queen Kwak now has its very own, brand spanking new Facebook page, hoorah. I have been a busy bee of late, squirrelling away and hopefully this shall be the first of a few new Queen Kwak sidelines to accompany my blog. The page has only just been established and I am slowly setting about adding all of my works/ witty comments (ahem) to it but if you should so happen to like what you see here and/ or like my work even just a smidgen then please, please, please, could you check out my page and like it right over here, I will be ever so thankful to you. Thank you, thank you, thank you very much indeed. 
And I really do hope you are liking what you see so far... Any comments or feedback would be very much appreciated. Even just a quick little hello would be nice. Thanking you lots, Toodle pip.

Life: Abuji/ Father's day Treasure Hunt fun.

This past Sunday was Fathers day, or Abuji's day, as it is known in our household. (That's Korean for Dad which you probably guessed). And so what does any doting daughter/ darling wife do on such a day? Why yes exactly that, they go away for the weekend with their friends, with not a dad or dad of their children in sight. Go me. In my defence, I never go away, tragically I never get to go out too much either. Boo. This trip had been arranged since last year, and I only realised two weeks ago that the weekends clashed and I felt really rather rubbish, so in my absence I decided to whip up this little treasure hunt so my babies and their daddy could have themselves some Abuji day fun. And fun they did have indeed. Here is how I went about planning our Abuji day treasure hunt.

Cards:

First we made lots and lots of cards, these were made by the babies at home and in nursery.

More Cards:

And then another card was made by my good self. That is a detachable felt rosette that I whipped (sewed and glued) up for the occasion, for Abuji to wear all day.

Banners:

Two little Abuji banners were cut out to hang up.

T-shirts:

And two little T-shirts had Abuji stencilled upon for our babies to wear for the day. The banner of the left in the photo above was actually the stencil for the T-shirts. I bought the T-shirts at Primark, £1.50 each and used some Dylon fabric paint I already owned.

Crown:

This crown, fit for a King Kwak, was sewn for the occasion, using felt, Dalmatian like fake fur and embroidery thread I already had to hand.

Book:

This is where I thought I should purchase a gift he may not put to one side after five minutes, so I hunted down a book I thought he may like. He likes it very much, so that is jolly good.

Map:

Once the treasures were gathered, I sat and pondered hiding places in our home for a very good while. Once decided I set about drawing a little treasure map for the occasion. It was very quick, but well they found the gifts easily so I figure it served its purpose well. The little lady had the responsible job of hiding the map until the Sunday, which she did very well.

Hide and Seek:

The treasures were packed into envelopes and wrapped and were hidden in pretty tricky places. If you can see the map clearly enough above, you can spot this lion print in clue number one, that's the little chaps room, I believe I may have mentioned my frame obsession once or twice?! I also made them keep alternating floors on each clue just to make it more fun (and ever so slightly annoying for Abuji).

Star Prize:

Any official treasure hunt has to have a star prize and ours was... Abuji's favourite beer, what a good wife/ mummy I am. I am quite surprised he did not guess what we were up to as the night the treasure was hidden, my little lady greeted her Abuji at the door from work with "We hid you some beer today, but I am not allowed to tell you that". Miraculously the little chap was dive-bombing onto him at that very moment and he did not hear. 

I have been told the treasure hunt went down very well with all and I got good mummy/ wife points despite my absence. The little lady spent the rest of the day hiding things in the same spots and making them hunt them down, they had a very nice day indeed. I too had a super amazing Abuji's day (aka weekend away with my friends), in case you were wondering.

So have you organised a treasure hunt? How did it go? Happy belated Fathers day to my babies Abuji, my Dad and any daddies who may read this, chin chin to you all.

Illustration: First attempt at Pattern Illustration.

As you are aware I am setting up my freelance Illustration company, it has been a little while in the making but fingers crossed I am almost ready to become official. In a bid to increase my work/ portfolio I have entered a couple of illustration competitions from Tigerprint who supply card/ wrap/ stationary to M&S. These competitions have been quite good at allowing me to tackle a different brief, the anxiety/ development of which is something I quite miss from my previous job. The brief last month was to design a female surface pattern. I was going to give it a miss, I was a bit snowed under with work at the time and decided to focus on their greeting card competitions, but then I gave myself a little slap across the face and pondered what I was thinking. I have been interested in pattern illustration for some time, have been wanting to have a go, so what was stopping me? I decided to give it a whirl, though with only a few days to spare before the deadline. Now lets make this clear from the offset, I did not win. Boo. Did not even come close in fact. Double boo. However I really enjoyed creating a pattern and having to work out how it repeats together, so that is what was important. I chose the subject of make up as I thought it covered females through a big old expanse of age groups. If I had more time I would not have gone with the make up, it is not really me, but at the time it seemed like a good solution for a female theme. 

        Pattern:

This is the segment of pattern I designed and illustrated. Make up tastic. Above is how it repeats together.

Thumbs up:

Alas this was before I found out I did not make the finals. To be fair, I was not expecting to and am rather chuffed to even be in the top 100.

        Alternative colours:

From looking at the finalists I think I need to possibly tone down my colours for any future entries. This was a quick mock up of possible alternative colours for my design. I think I prefer it.

So I hope you liked my very first attempt at surface pattern illustration, I am definitely going to give it another go when I have a chance. A little beg here... If anyone could please point the way to further illustration competitions I would be ever so thankful, I would not mind entering some from time to time. And if anyone is aware of any templates for creating pattern and could lead the way to them for me, I would be even more ever so grateful. I am normally quite proud that I can track down anything on the web, but can I find templates? No I cant. Do they even exist? Can anyone possibly shed some light over here? Thank you lots!!

Artwork copyright of Queen Kwak.

Illustration: Personalised Ballerina Print.

Here is an illustration I originally drew for my daughter the ballerina. She takes ballet lessons, each week she returns and I ask her what she has learnt and each week it is the same thing... smiley feet. Very cute, but it has been a year and a half. So in a bid to encourage her ballerina ambition here is a little print I made for her bedroom, she loves it. Have I mentioned my frame obsession before? There are an awful lot of frames in our house, hundreds, and above is a mere snippet from one of the little ladies bedroom walls.

Casually hanging around:

On a side note I have been a little absent from here this past week as I have in fact been building my website. A proper website, I had a little informal lesson a week or so ago and now I am almost there. This print will be upon it and will be available to be fully personalised. I hope to add a link to my website very soon.

Personalised Print:

Last Christmas the little lady was in a ballet show, in a proper theatre on a real life stage and everything. She was so not happy about it when we first arrived, to be fair none of the under fours seemed to be best pleased, but the teachers told us she will soon love it, and sure enough she did. It was an amazing day for her and us, and here is a little photo of before she went on stage not looking too impressed. 

My daughter the ballerina:

Artwork copyright of Queen Kwak.