“Make Yourself at Home” by Moorea Seal, is filled with delightful decorating ideas for your home. Photo by Marissa Maharaj

Moorea Seal is a designer, and retailer, who has a large Pinterest following and advocates for mental health. Photo by Marissa Maharaj

Make the space fun and inviting but shop for items in secondhand shops to keep costs low. Photo by Marissa Maharaj

Make Yourself at Home (Sasquatch Books, 2017) by Moorea Seal, shows readers new ways to decorate to make any space feel like their own. Follow Seals’ leads to create a homey space, learn how to check for great deals and how to use color to inspire you. Find this excerpt in Chapter 2, “Kitchen.”

My favorite parts of any meal are the herbs and sauces, the details that make a meal come to life. Most meals call for just a dash of herbs, so when picking herbs from your garden or buying fresh herb bundles from the grocery store, you can save all your extras and dry them here on your drying rack for later use! It’s not only useful but decorative, and fills your kitchen with the scent of delicious dried herbs.

Materials and Tools

Baker’s twine

Measuring tape

Scissors

6 bunches fresh herbs (you can and these at your local grocery store, usually in the vegetable section in little plastic packaging—I used oregano, rosemary, thyme, bay leaves, tarragon, and sage)

1 (14-inch) embroidery hoop

9 (25-millimeter) wooden beads Superglue

6 clothespins

Ceiling hook

Steps

Cut your twine into six pieces, each 15 inches long. Create a small loop at the end of each piece of twine. Take one piece of twine and, using the unlooped end, wrap it around the base of one bunch of herbs, tying it off tightly and leaving the loop exposed. Repeat this process with each bunch of herbs. Remove the inner hoop from the embroidery hoop. You won’t be using the outer hoop, just the inner one. Measure how far you would like your herb drying rack to hang from the ceiling. Take that measurement and add 10 inches. Now cut three pieces of twine to that length. I wanted mine to hang about 15 inches from the ceiling, so I cut three 25-inch pieces of twine. Using about 5 inches of one piece of twine, wrap it a few times around the hoop, and tie off. Repeat this process with the two other pieces of twine, making sure that the three pieces of twine are equal distances from each other. String three wooden beads onto each of these pieces of twine. Gather the loose ends of the three pieces of twine and tie them all together, leaving 5 inches between the knot and the end of each piece. Make sure that when you hold up the hoop by the twine, it looks balanced. Create a loop with one of the 5-inch ends of twine. Using the superglue, glue the end of the loop to the base knot. Then wrap the two leftover 5-inch pieces of twine around the knot and glue the ends to the knot. Using the clothespins, evenly attach the herb bundles to the hoop by clipping the clothespins to the hoop and to the loop of twine on the end of each herb bundle. Evenly space your clothespins around the hoop so the herb bundles are balanced. Now, simply screw in a ceiling hook where you want to hang your herb drying rack, and hang it up!

©2017 by Moorea Seal. All rights reserved. Excerpted from Make Yourself at Home by permission of Sasquatch Books.