House Proud is a new kind of guide that takes age-old craft skills, but rather than showing how to make corn dollies or stringy owl wall hangings, updates the aesthetic  and teaches readers how to create sassy designer pieces like vintage Chanel scarf cushions or tables decoupaged with flocks of parrots.

The idea is to encourage readers to find their own own style and give them skills to express it.

Author Danielle Proud explains:
The idea for House Proud hit me while I was flicking through interior magazines full of designer cushions, tarted-up old chairs and fabulous wallpapered furniture - pieces that cost hundreds or  thousands of pounds. These achingly expensive objets were part of a 'look' which, totted up, would cost my annual salary.

My parents taught me all sorts of craft skills when I was growing up in America and I really liked the idea of passing these skills on, but in a modern way.

The thought struck me afresh when I started looking for furniture for the house my husband and I were buying. I went to Habitat and Heal's, then checked out homeware boutique Mint, and also Paul Smith's collection with Cappellini. There was plenty that I wanted, especially in the latter (chairs covered in Verner Panton fabrics!), but prices - £200 for a single chair in Habitat and more like £1,200 in Paul Smith - were prohibitive. An eight-chair dining set from Mr Smith would set you back ten grand - and that's before you've bought the table.

Soon after this fruitless shopping trip, I was visiting a friend in Devon and saw similar chairs in a dusty old antique shop at £40 each. They needed new upholstery and a few scratches polishing out, but, with basic craft skills, I realised that I could create my own set and buy snazzy designer fabrics for the upholstery with the money I'd saved. Eight chairs uncannily similar to Paul Smith's for less than the cost of two from Habitat.

I've always preferred making something individual to buying mass-produced pieces. It adds a personal touch and is a good opportunity to reinvent, restore and be creative - not to mention brush up on the practical skills my mother's generation were so good at: choosing the fabric to reupholster mismatching dining chairs to make them into a set or adding applique to cover the holes in an old blanket, for example. In the postwar years, this need for imaginative reinvention was integral to our parents' homes; it's also what gave their places a heart, continuity and a sense of the owner - not something that can be said of flat-pack furniture.

While the 'make do and mend' ethos isn't relevant to us today - IKEA and eBay mean that decent, inexpensive homeware is within most people's reach - the same skills can be. This book is about reclaiming  the know-how that has skipped our generation, and choosing to recycle and restyle -and value - the objects that we already own, or pieces that others have discarded which have crossed our path or caught our eye.

In House Proud, I've used stacks of my mother's vintage scarves - gifts from my dad when they first started dating - to make cushions; I've wallpapered a boring 1980s chest of drawers that saw me through my college years to give it a fresh, designer look, and found uses for old toys and a tired-looking table found in a friend's loft. Every piece has a narrative and together they tell stories of the past, the present and, in their new guises, the future. They tell my story: in the first chapter, I used three of my 1960s print dresses - one of which I was wearing at the party where I first met my husband - to make oven gloves, aprons and an ironing board cover. Working these favourite dresses into such items, once they were too threadbare to wear, means I'm now surrounded by fabulous memories every time I step into the kitchen - not to mention able to amuse my friends and family with the tale of how the dress I pulled my husband in is now doing second duty as oven mitts.

I am probably a little predisposed to homecraft, having spent a chunk of my  childhood in America in the 1970s and 80s where my mother, who was very taken with folk art, taught me patchwork, needlepoint and stencilling. My father worked in marketing by day but would spend his evenings painstakingly restoring antique furniture and would enlist my polishing skills. This serves to illustrate that most craft skills are exceptionally easy to pick up, even for children. I had the knack of decoupage and wood-staining, and was quite a talented needlewoman by the age of ten. So no excuses.

House Proud is packed with all sorts of crafts, many that children will want to help with. So next time you decide your pad needs an upgrade, instead of wincing at the cost of a reconditioned chair in Elle Decoration, swap the shop-bought trail for an afternoon's creativity.

Why not decoupage the scratched old breakfast table with 1960s Vogue covers or photographs of your friends? Decoupage involves sticking your pictures to a surface and varnishing over them, and can be done in an afternoon. Or make new lampshades for  the children's bedroom from some leftover wallpaper. Cherry-pick from eras and influences - rebalance and remix them to make a style that is your own.

The processes involved are fabulously therapeutic and there's plenty to inspire you. Today craft is chic, sociable and a million miles away  from those stringy 1970s macrame owl wall-hangings.

Today's designers are producing comic-book cushions, papier-mache dogs covered with dollar bills and racy messages in cross-stitch. These are craft pieces that look more like art - and command art-like price tags - yet they aren't that hard to make. All the more reason to do it yourself.

Putting your own rooms together is easy - in fact, it's very similar to putting an outfit together, which everyone does every morning. With House Proud, I'm hoping to enocourage people to dig out their old  postcards, scraps of fabric and anything else they've collected, stop drooling over interior 'porn' and start individualising their homes.