DESCRIBE THE PREMISE OF THE SHOW
WELL, it's basically a show embracing the concept of upcycling, so, rather than just throwing something away that either feels dated or is broken in some way, or you've got something lying around that has been cluttering up the house for ages and doesn't really serve a useful purpose, this show is about kind of looking at old things with new eyes and coming up with ways of refreshing them or repurposing them into something that basically is new and useful and beautiful hopefully.
WHO ELSE APPEARS IN THE SHOW WITH YOU?
It's three of us [Max McMurdo and Zoe Pocock] who are, it has to be said, a lot more talented and creative than me. I've been a long admirer of people like Max and Zoe who seem to be able to create things out of nothing with seemingly no effort at all.
For me, I can have lots of ideas but I do find doing them quite difficult so it was a big learning curve for me to actually, instead of sit and think, "Oh, I could maybe do this with that one day", actually having to get on and do it.
What I hope is that people watching the show who maybe are a bit more like me will think, "if she can do it, we definitely can".
WHAT CAN YOU TELL US ABOUT THE CLAY PIZZA OVEN YOU BUILT ON THE SHOW?
Before this project was even talked about, we were building a new pond [at home] and so we dug it out with a digger and I was like, "We've got all this clay soil, it just seems like a waste not to do something with it".
And then this project came up and I said to the production company, we've got all this clay, we could use it to make an oven. It was just the perfect thing of 'we've got this stuff lying round – let's try and make something beautiful and useful'.
It's a long project and it's quite complicated but on pretty much our last day filming we were eating pizzas, which was great.
THERE WAS ALSO AN EMOTIONAL SIDE BEHIND A FEW OF THE STORIES
I know there were some things that Zoe did that, they were old pieces of furniture or old things that were very connected to her family. I didn't have any of that but for me, creating something as lasting as a pizza oven, that's something that's going to be, it's now very much part of our lives and something that we use and that we built here and there is something very satisfying about that.
One of the other things we did was we made a herbal bath. And the herbal bath was an old bath we found in our local reclamation yard and planted as a herb garden and it looks beautiful and it's just outside our back door. So I go and pick herbs from it every time I'm cooking, so that's really nice.
It feels like we've created things that have a genuine use day to day and just, you know, become part of our lives. It's always really lovely to receive a present from somebody that feels very personal and I think doing projects like the ones we've done all feel very personal, they feel like they've come from a very personal space rather than somebody saying, "Oh, why don't you make this?".
:: The Weekend Workshop airs from today on HGTV and is available to stream on dplay
