Photography and lighting problem

The good thing about a studio environment, is you can take your time to manually expose.

True, but our kitchen falls sadly short in terms of studio capability 🙂

I’m thinking I’ll get some thick white fabric to make a tent, a piece of card maybe and a bright desk lamp.

Although, she’s now thinking that the plain white backgrounds are boring and we need to do something else. This could get complicated.

Don’t get thick white fabric and make a tent. As you will not have room to get the lights inside.
I would get some lengths of 1×1 wood and make some simple frames and than staple some diffusion material to them, cheapest would be tracing paper on a roll from an art shop (make the frames the same size as the paper roll) or splash out on a roll of frost made by Lee or Rosco. Then your lights go on the outside and depending on how close/ far will alter contrast. While you are at the art shop buy a roll of white paper so you have a nice clean background and a big enough bit of paper to staple to a frame as a reflector.

That’s good ghetto advice MrSmith thanks 🙂 we may even have a roll of tracing paper.