The Lovely Drawer

stylish little people

I’m not going to lie, it’s taken me a little while to fully immerse myself in the magical land of baby shops and buying anything myself. Pre 20 weeks it felt a bit wrong to be buying things and I think after the events of last year I didn’t quite believe it was real. I don’t believe in tempting fate but I do know that having a room filled with baby gear and sweet little details would make things a whole lot harder if anything did go wrong. I really got into browsing for bubs in my third trimester and first of all I was confronted with a sea of rainbow colours and plastic, cheap looking rubbish. I was thinking surely it doesn’t have to be like this, especially when the baby is too young to care about what things look like themselves? Why do adults with more minimal tastes need to subject themselves to this trippy funfair? I get, that some people may well love this colourful, playful vibe but I was sure there had to be something out there for those of us who don’t.

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Let Your Ears Do The Talking

Things swing in roundabouts don’t they? I remember loving myself a statement earring at uni. I was all about those big ol’ gems in my ears for a night out or even just a trip in for some studio time. My mum used to call them my Pat Butcher earrings and that was probably a reasonably accurate description. Then I turned my attentions to necklaces and layering them up for many years while my ears saw very little action, in fact part of me wondered if they’d closed up completely. But hear we are again and I’m loving a statement earring!

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Babymoon

Well I’m well and truly into my third trimester and it feels like it too. It’s a little taster of what general body movement might feel like for me at 70 + years old and it turns out it’s hard work. Back in the transition between second and third trimester we booked to go away for a little babymoon of sorts which I really felt was much needed by the time it came around. The second trimester was a heck of a lot easier than the dark days of the first which I chatted about a bit here.

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DIY Hallway Storage With Shurgard

As I said in my last DIY post, there isn’t a whole lot going on in our hallway and to be honest there hasn’t been since moving in. It’s a room that’s so often neglected so I’ve been trying to rectify that lately, making it practical but welcoming. I teamed up with Shurgard, experts in storage solutions to create some extra hallway storage.

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Take Me To The Countryside

All photos by Sophie Carefull

Take a group of eager bloggers in one very dreamy location in Somerset, thrown together with a number of highly instagrammable independent brands and, hey presto!…you have weekend:IN. This year was to celebrate ‘A Summer of Colour’ and get me, I even wore  colour for the occasion. If you know me at all, you’ll know that that’s a scarce rarity!

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Just Hanging Out, Looking Stylish

I have a confession…this DIY was invented to resolve a very real bugbear I have at home that’s, been getting on my nerves ever since living with my Husband. I love him very much and he’s actually very neat and tidy for a boy but we both have certain blind spots around the home (I know I frustrate him in other ways) but for me it’s when he dumps certain items. Number one are shoes and I even hear myself saying this and feel fully aware that I’ve turned into my Mum who harped on at me for the very same thing, but it baffles me that there are shoes all around the house when there’s a cupboard with a shelf and a shoe hanger, as well as a separate cupboard with a shoe organiser on offer. I recently went around the house and collected six pairs of shoes to put away! Six pairs! He was very apologetic it has to be said but my main issue has always been what I call the ‘Hey, I’m home’ collection. Nick doesn’t have a proper wallet, instead he has a card holder and a collection of loose coins and receipts, along with his keys and lip balm that spend the day floating around his pockets and end up on our dining room table when he arrives back home. It was the same in our old flat but these things made their bed for the night on the counter instead. I’ve tried fashioning various storage boxes for these zones, announcing that they will be for all of these miscellaneous items only to find them ignored completely, with the ‘Hey, I’m home’ collection comically residing next to said storage box. My favourite quirk is that one of our sided coasters now gets used to store the loose change rather than the box I’d deliberately set aside.

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DFS Capsule Collection: Doing Stylish, Smaller

Design for small spaces is a topic that’s close to my London-tied heart. Most of us city dwellers have to embrace what we’ll put politely as ‘petite’ homes and nowhere is that more prevalent in the UK than in London itself. When we moved here nearly five years ago there was no question we would find a flat in Shepherd’s Bush so we could be in the community where our church plant was based. We were committed to being part of a local church and therefore set to work trawling through Right Move for properties close by. It took all of a few minutes to realise that we would have to almost double our Basingstoke rent budget in order to get a space that was slightly smaller than our base at the time. We’d obviously been aware that it would be more expensive, but double??!! And that was coming from an area that wasn’t particularly cheap to live in by our country’s standards. We searched high and low for a place still holding out hope to squeeze in a dining table somewhere. At that stage we didn’t care if it was nestled in the corner of the living room, just please give us somewhere to eat other than the sofa!

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Jackson & Levine x Habitat: dining with friends

How often do you open your home to people to enjoy good food and conversation? It’s something we love doing but always make a point of keeping things simple, otherwise we wouldn’t feel like doing it as much and after all it’s mainly about the company and getting to chat over food. Being sat around a dinner table has this God given power to help us get to know each other and deepen relationships. I was so happy to be invited to an event a few weeks ago that was totally inspired by this whole notion. The event was to celebrate the launch of the new Jackson & Levine collaboration with Habitat and stems from their cook book and love of supper clubs.

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Escape To Clifton For My 30th

I recently waved good bye to my twenties and had to come to terms with the fact I was moving into a totally new decade, one that sounded far too grown up for me! I’d ‘ummmed’ and ‘ahhhed’ about what to do for my 30th birthday. Everyone asked if I was going to have a big party to celebrate but I’m just not really that kind of gal. I love organising them for other people but somehow can’t handle the idea of being centre of attention or working out who to invite or often taking it personally when people drop out last minute. Hassle, hassle! I opted to just spend it with my hubby and have a night away together because after weekends of him beavering away at freelance work and me either at workshops or sleeping off the pregnancy fog, we realised we hadn’t actually spent much proper time together. We were so happy to receive a night’s stay in Number Thirty Eight Clifton, Bristol, a place I’d admired on social media for a while, not to mention I’d never actually visited Bristol before (horror face)!Read more

What’s In The Box?

I don’t know about you but I’ve spent a lot of time lately, lusting after terrazzo everything. I was particularly in love with the technique when I visited Paris in March and between the wall in Cafe Kitsuné and the gorgeous table tops in Peonies Cafe, I knew I had to recreate something similar for a DIY project and so friends, that’s exactly what I’ve done! And who would have thought it would involve Fimo???….umm everyone!

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