Kirstie's Crafty Christmas

In this craft-filled show, Kirstie Allsopp offers a festive fast-track guide to ensuring the big day goes off with a bang. In this spectacular Christmas special, wonder-woman Kirstie shows how fast crafts can beat the clock and make a big impact.

“When I was young my mum’s job was to mount and frame pictures, now she’s an Interior Decorator and my dad worked at Christie’s Auctioneers for 42 years,” offers Allsopp. “I know that my passion for property and tastes in interiors have been heavily influenced by both my parents and now my parents in law, who for fifty years have run an incredible shop called the Lacquer Chest on Kensington Church Street. I’m not by any means recreating the house I was brought up in, my style is different from my parents, but I have to admit this acorn hasn’t fallen very far from the tree.

“From a young age I was pretty fixated with the look of my bedroom,” she continues. “I didn’t have posters of pop stars (it’s true) but I remember buying my first second hand picture – it was an embroidered garden scene I found in an antiques market in Hungerford and I thought it was truly beautiful. I had a dressing table full of bits I collected and for my twelfth birthday my mum turned my bed into a four-poster dressed with white fabric, green bows and a pink trim.  I was absolutely crazy about that bed.  But, when we moved house my mum had the curtains of my beloved bed made into blinds for my new room…  Why? Because I moved into the attic.  Needless to say my family have always lived by an ethos of reuse and recycle, and goodness knows it’s stuck on me.”