2 and 3 Tahini and Marmite In joint position, as they work best jointly. Spread them on toast together, add some tomato slices, and grill to perfection – it rivals all other On Toast dishes. Or add both to fried mushrooms for a saucy breakfast.

4 Nutritional Yeast Flakes Pukey name, looks like fish food, but sprinkle on top of a lasagne and you get a yummy browned, cheesy crust. Or sprinkle on salad. Or eat straight from the tub. The brand name is Engevita. I can only apologise for the non-appealing-ness of this product. It’s like the ugly loner girl at school who is secretly scintillating.

5 Faith in Nature Shower Gel Reasonably priced and cleans you good and proper. Sticky deodorant scum be gone.

6 Alpro Soya Chocolate Desserts Oh dear, the second chocolate mousse related item on my list. It’s yum. The vanilla one’s not bad either.

7 Coconut Milk / Creamed Coconut Since going vegan I’ve discovered the wonderful world of curry-making. Add coconut for a creamy taste, or cook your rice in coconut milk – luxurious.

8 Bourbons and HobNobs Hooray! Biscuits that are secretly vegan!

9 Seitan My favourite meat used to be duck. Lucky, then, that seitan, aka fake duck, exists. I’ve not cooked at home with it yet, but I’ve had it in vege restaurants and it makes an authentic crispy duck pancake.

10 Proper plain chocolate Green and Blacks recently added milk to their plain chocolate. Why? Proper plain choc, with no dairy, is so so so much nicer. Don’t stand for any milky nonsense in your plain chocolate.

And one to avoid…

Vegan Cream Cheese Just wrong. Do not treat this as if it is somehow related to Philadelphia. It is not. It is deeply untasty. (Though to be fair, mixed with enough marg and icing sugar it makes a decent fairycake frosting. So it is partly forgiven.)

So in the spirit of sharing you can go and listen to my highly embarassing and seriously-not-my-best and not-what-all–my-other-songs-are-like-at-all and if-anyone-I-know-finds-this-I’ll-die song on myspace. Go on, have a crafty listen.

Well, Channel 4 have got a new “craft” programme starting soon, with Kirsty Allsop presenting it. If you have a strong stomach, you can read all about it here, including this marvellously sick comment: “I had a baby just three months ago, and this project has almost become my second baby, so it’s like I’ve had twins.”

If you need an antidote to this, go to the Handmade Nation website, to find out about a lovingly crafted film that’s been made by a proper crafty girl using the same honest values as the craftspeople it features.

The first time I did this was in a Costa Coffee in Paddington Station – “please could you just fill this with tap water for me?” – and a lovely man did so and said something like “every little thing helps save the planet”. And he smiled.

I just used one bottle for a whole week in Amsterdam, getting it refilled at the bar on the ferry, at the sweetie counter in the cinema, in a cafe and lots of other places.

Nobody has ever refused to refill a bottle for me. Only once has someone done it grumpily (woman in Sheffield train station – shame on you!).

I haven’t yet crafted my own sandals from used bottles – maybe next summer… In the meantime I’ll carry on getting my bottle refilled wherever I go, for free, no extra packaging involved.

I love this French company’s products. They’re so clever it’s almost annoying, but their stuff is also charming and silly. It took me ages to decide what to pick from their website to show you here – I chose the magic hat tissue box. But I could have chosen the sponge microphone, water spill coaster, miss world t-shirt or surface of the moon rug, and you’d have been just as intrigued.

They deliver pretty fast considering it’s from France, but order in plenty of time because it could take a while to arrive. It’s sort of all the silly things you get in silly arty shops over here, but a bit fresher.

When I googled ‘Lions Teen Tracks’, though, very little came up. This was an imprint of HarperCollins from around the years 1976 to 1991 – I can’t be accurate here because I can’t find any information (well, not through a quick google session anyway… must renew British Library membership!). Lions Teen Tracks published an amazing amount of teen fiction by lots of different authors, some of whom, like Francine Pascal, went on to fame and fortune. Others wrote a slew of Tracks novels, and some just a single gem of a book…

Many of the novels tackle serious issues like sexual abuse and disability, but I’m sorry to say that I’m a sucker for the more humdrum stories of high school, first love, and all that teen jazz. Sorry.

Part of my Lions love comes from the amazing covers. There were a number of standard cover ‘looks’ over the years, all gloriously, classically eighties. Torn effect coloured backgrounds? Check. Different coloured squares and triangles jostling for position? Check. Ill-proportioned pencil and watercolour illustrations? Check. Silver foiling? Mmm, check.

Best place for finding them now? Charity shops. My local library had nada. A couple of links for you: Wikipedia’s Young Adult Fiction page, and a teen fic post on The Lipster.

Recently at a village fete style event run by the lovely live art people Home, I met a lady called Izzy Lane, who rescues sheep which would otherwise be killed due to such crimes as being male, missing a pregnancy, being too lame, small, old or otherwise ‘flawed’ (it’s not only us humans under pressure to be perfect, you know). Once Izzy has rescued these shat-upon sheep, she uses their wool to produce gorgeous clothes. Izzy says she has a passion for “great clothes, animals and Britain”. That pretty much sums up my own interests, too.

I’m having fashion palpitations over her cashmere waistcoat above. It’s £148, which puts a slight dampener on things, although I do think that’s an excellent price. Everything is right about this piece – the goats are happy, the design is perfect, the construction looks beautiful, it’s probably softer than snow. I did just spend around this amount of money on a bowl from the new Rob Ryan shop, Ryantown, but I’m already paranoid about it breaking, and let’s face it, I’m not going to wear a bowl out or have to get it dry-cleaned, so my damage paranoia can be contained (just like my apples). If I had this waistcoat, I’d only be able to wear it in sterile situations.

So for now I’ll just stare longingly at this picture.

Sigh.

A while ago I posted about the rug me and my boyfriend made. Until I made this, my craft projects were always tiny. Now they will all be huge! So let’s go all Blue Peter-y and I’ll show you how to make your own rag rug!

:: Step one…

You will be requring some canvas. I’ve read you can use hessian, but I managed to find the last bit of proper rug canvas at Kentish Town’s marvellous Delicate Stitches shop. So try there first if you’re in London, or bug Liberty’s haberdashery department. Last time I checked they had stopped selling it due to lack of demand. Show them there is demand. Failing that, I like the Willow Fabrics website. They’re always helpful and they have a gazillion types of canvas (and yikes, I just noticed they’ve put their business up for sale! Somebody buy it! Please!).

I think mine is 3.3 hole per inch hooking rug canvas. But I wouldn’t be too picky – take what you can get! Bind the cut edges with masking tape, as shown above. Oh, and you’ll need a latch hook too, as seen in action below.

:: Step two…

Depending on the size you’re going for, you will need either a hell of a lot of fabric, or a shitload. Seriously these things EAT fabric. Get all the fabric. Cut it into strips (mine were about an inch by six inches, but you can experiment). Throw away your ruler after the first few, and just hold your finished strips up against your fabric and cut by eye.

You can use a random mix of colours, or do stripes and patterns. Probably a good idea to draw any patterns out on the canvas first.

:: Step three…

This is where the hooker jokes come in. Push your hook down into the canvas, and up through the next hole. Place a fabric strip inside the hook part. Now pull the hook out, back the way it came. It will close on the fabric and bring it through. Viola! A tuft!

:: Step four…

Carry on hooking and you’ll start to develop a patch of rug. Find something good on tv. Clear your diary. Keep going. It will turn into a rug.

:: Step five…

The finishing step is to sew over the masking-taped edges with some ribbon or long fabric strip, to give it a nice soft edge (I used the long seams left over from a big sheet I’d cut up).

And that’s it! You’re a rag doll!