That retro-knitwear staple, the snood, is very fashionable again this year, with all kinds of patterns and colours available in high street shops. But you don’t need to splash out on a new accessory to keep you warm this winter. You can simply upcycle an old festive jumper or cardigan that’s past
So Christmas is over but it’s still the holidays so you’ll be looking for activities to keep yourselves and the children entertained until they go back to school in January. I’ve already shared ideas for Christmas films to watch so now I’d like to suggest some options for a holiday
It’s finally Christmas eve and I can’t believe it’s arrived! Everything is done, all the presents are wrapped and the food is waiting to be cooked, all that’s left to do is snuggle down on the sofa, in festive PJs and enjoy a cup of hot chocolate while I wait for
Today is the end of my month-long challenge to improve the quality of my sleep. Hopefully you’ll have already read all about my sleep challenge and how it got me thinking about making some changes to my bedroom decor. If you’re interested to read up on all of my past
It was my birthday last week and I really enjoyed scoffing cake and celebrating with lots of girly fun! Most of all, I loved getting dressed up in this red lace dress – a special treat from La Redoute 🙂 It’s a lovely shape, comfortable and perfectly fitted. The lace overlay
A couple of weeks ago I started planning my birthday party. I usually completely overlook my birthday because I get too excited about Christmas. But this year I have my little vintage caravan, which seems to be the perfect venue to celebrate my getting a year older! I have already shared
This week is Cassiefairy’s birthday and to celebrate I’ve baked a cake for a little birthday celebration I’m having in my little vintage caravan. I wanted to break from tradition and avoid my usual victoria sponge cake this year (even though it is my favourite) so I thought about making a
I’m planning a red and pink theme for my birthday celebration and have shared my ideas on the blog via this moodboard. One of the decoration idea that I was keen to replicate was hanging pom-poms, but I wanted something more permanent than tissue paper, so I decided to use
Last week I shared my inspiration for creating a pink and red themed birthday party. I usually forget all about my birthday in the excitement of the run-up to Christmas, so this year I’ve made an effort to mark the occasion with a little party in my little vintage caravan.
As you know, I regularly blog about thrifty fashion and DIY fashion hacks on the Oxfam fashion blog. Oxfam has asked me to share my favourite party dress with all their wonderful readers and I thought I’d show you it too: My party dress was bought for me by thrifty mother
A few weeks ago I shared my recipe for using apples and blackberries to create a flavoured vodka and this got me thinking about creating other types of fruit flavoured alcohol using my hedgerow finds. The first and most obvious choice was to make sloe gin and after a rummage through
Today is Thanksgiving Day is the US and I’ve found that it’s quickly becoming a bit of a tradition to celebrate it here in the UK too. Traditionally it’s a special day of relaxation and reflection with all the family and involves a thanksgiving dinner with a roast turkey –
A couple of weeks ago, one of my closest friends and blogger-extraordinaire Jenna from Glitter Daze blog came to stay with me and we has a fantastic time going on little trips, taking snaps for our blogs and getting stuck into craft projects so that we would have plenty of DIY tutorials
My birthday is coming up soon, and what with the Christmas celebrations, I often overlook it myself! I get too excited about the festive season and forget to make any plans to celebrate my birthday. This year, I thought I’d treat myself to a little pink-and-red party in my vintage
I’ve spotted a trend for festive interior decor this year – framed Christmas prints. I’ve seen them popping up in interior design magazines and DIY hacks are all over Pinterest so I’m certainly going to be following this trend and creating my own festive artwork this year. I love this idea for Christmas decorating because it
So on this wet Wednesday morning, what better to chat to you about than my new ironing board. Honestly, it’s a much more interesting topic than you’d think! I needed to replace my previous ironing board this week because I discovered that it has gone mouldy and rusty where it had
Earlier this week I mentioned that I was having a go at making my own dress. I’d got the fabric ready, chosen the dress style, cut out the pattern and was ready to make the first cut. Just like so many others around the world, I was making my first
You’d be forgiven for thinking that we have gone back in time to our grandmother’s era, when shops didn’t sell off-the-peg clothes, and make-do-and-mend was a way of life rather than a quaint Pinterest board. But no, this trend is happening right now in the 21st century and tons of people are choosing to
I’ve received fantastic news that my little lifestyle blog has been honoured by REXLondon.com as one of their favourite blogs. They contacted me to let me know that I’d won this little award for my crafty sewing projects and that they had shared details of my blog on their ‘beautiful crafting blogs’ page.
Although lots of fireworks displays took place over the weekend, today is finally bonfire night and hubby and I have decided to have traditional bonfire-fare of jacket potatoes and chilli for dinner, and build ourselves a little bonfire in the garden. I’ll try to take some photos to share with you
This month’s Inspiration Challenge theme was ‘apples’ and luckily enough I’ve since been given loads of apples from my mother’s apple tree which had bumper-crop this year. So I had a think about what I really wanted to make (after crumbles, of course!) and the answer was blackberry and apple jam. So I
Over the weekend I went for a lovely chilly walk with my hubby and collected a few bits and pieces for my harvest display. I’d planned to decorate my home for autumn (as we discussed in this previous blog post) and I’d finally found the time to nip out to
Over the past few weeks I’ve been making a concerted effort to stop buying new products and use up what I already have. Click to read my blog post about the challenge I set for myself and now that we’re getting towards the end of October, I wanted to share my progress. As you
Find frugal inspiration for weddings, birthdays, anniversaries, hen nights, parties, festive celebrations & more!
Did you know it’s National Chocolate Week? I had no idea until my friend Jenna gave me a heads-up yesterday afternoon. Are you telling me that I could have been legitimately scoffing chocolate all week, and I didn’t know about it? I guess I’ve got a lot of choccie-eating to make up
We all know that emerald is Pantone’s colour of the year for 2013 (here’s my blog post about it from January) and although we are 3/4 of the way through the year, this doesn’t mean that the colour is any less on trend. In fact, it’s really coming into its
When the leaves begin changing and the pumpkins start arriving in the stores it can only mean one thing: it’s time to start decorating your home for Autumn – or at least that’s the case according to Pinterest ha! It’s certainly a new trend here in the UK to start
Let’s start with the real reason why I’m setting myself this challenge: I need to save money between now and Christmas (yes, I’ve peeped into the piggy-bank and there’s not enough in there to buy Christmas cards, let alone anything else!) and the best way to do this is to stop
I’ve decided to go for a little ‘design feature’ on one of the walls of my little caravan. I want to wallpaper one wall to create a feature wall, so I went to the DIY store and picked up some samples of pretty wallpapers in shades of pink, yellow and blue,
The summer holidays are drawing to a close, but that means there are lots of pretty fed up children around! Here’s an idea for a fun activity that you can do with your children to stop the boredom and entertain them during the last couple of weeks of the school holidays. This is
Well, it’s not that much of a tutorial – it’s a fairly simple process to create a cute tea-light holder without breaking the bank. I knew that I would like some rainbow-coloured tealight holders to decorate our anniversary party venue and light up the hall after dark. This project can just
For this week’s Tuesday Shoesday I’m focusing on what’s going on my legs before I put my shoes on. Okay, I know it’s an odd time of year to be talking about tights, but I assure you – there’s good reason for it! Firstly, you can get a real bargain on
My brother gave me this beautiful unicorn cookie-cutter for Christmas. I know it’s a bit lame to admit it, but I’ve only just got round to using trying out and we’re already 6 months into the year! Oh well, at least I’ve made some unicorn biscuits now and my bro
Frugal Fun <ul> <li> Need inspiration for a fun yet thrifty party? </li> <li> Want to add a crafty DIY touch to your seasonal celebrations? </li> <li> Are you planning your wedding but don’t want to blow the budget? </li> <li> Looking for low-cost entertainment ideas? </li> <li> Planning a
Did you read Eat, Pray, Love? Did you watch the film? Did you study all the DVD extras? I did. And I really enjoyed both the book and the film. I think that reading the book before watching the film was definitely a good idea, because there are a few
There’s nothing better than a great big Sunday roast, in my opinion. And Easter weekend is one of the times during the year that I can pretty much guarantee that we’ll be rustling up a roast dinner. We’ll probably have a lovely roast chicken (or even a small Turkey –
Recently I had a pal coming round for dinner and realised that I didn’t have anything sorted for pudding – there was no ice cream in the fridge, no custard in the cupboard and I’d definitely not baked a cake. So I rummaged around in the kitchen and basically threw
Have you ever thought that you might pop from excitement. Well that’s how I felt when I opened the parcel containing my book. “Eeeeeeeeeeee” is not enough..! I made this recipe book to house all my favourite Pieday Friday recipes and I made an e-book version so that all of my
I thought I’d share a quick review of the book that’s on my bedside table right now. I’m reading Success Intelligence by Robert Holden PhD, the bestselling author of Be Happy. I’d heard many good things about the author and have fancied reading his books for a while, so when this one
I’ve been working on a little craft project especially for Mother’s Day and here’s my finished item, based on a tutorial that I saw on Pinterest. The original idea came from this image from Pretty Pastels and then I went looking for instructions on making a DIY version – which I
As we all know it’s National Pie Week in the UK this week (I hope you saw my blog post on my favourite pie recipes on Monday?) and I have some more good news to share with you… I’ve been working on a free recipe book to share all my Pieday
This week is National Pie Week – what more of an excuse do you need to try out one of my Pieday Friday recipes and treat the family to a hearty and sometimes surprisingly healthy meal? So I’ve pulled together my favourite recipes and here’s a summary of the best
You may remember that I wrote a blog post last week about this vintage pattern by Simplicity that I found whilst rummaging in my local charity shop. I wanted to make myself a this skirt but didn’t know where to start with buying fabric – everything I’d found online was a bit pricey
I’ll admit it, I’m not a big fan of fish. A tin of tuna, I can cope with. But real fish – nope. Too many scary bones and scaly skin and how do you cook it? However, my family do like fish, and if that’s what my mum wants, that’s
Happy monday morning everyone! It’s half term and that means hubby has a bit of time off work so we will be super-busy this week but we’ve just got back from a relaxing weekend in Cambridge for our Valentines treat! I’ve been to Cambridge a couple of times before, but
It’s that time of year again – Christmas came and went taking most of our bank balances with it and a year full of money-demanding events lies ahead. However, never fear – if you’ve been given the heady task of organising a hen party then you’ll be pleased to know that it
This week I’ve baked some cute cupcakes and now I’m blogging the photos so you can have a go yourself at baking these afternoon-tea treats for the weekend. These cupcakes look pretty standard (although I did take a long time decorating them because I was trying out my new piping
Finally, it’s the last day of January and the month of grey weather and near-poverty after christmas has come to an end – well done everyone, we got through it! I think that deserves a special treat for us all 🙂 I’ve been trying to think of a thrifty way
As the murky month of January finally starts drawing to a close we can all start looking forward to the rest of the year; it’s already one month closer to our summer holidays, a couple of months to the chocolate delights of Easter and only a couple of weeks until Valentine’s day.
Here’s a guest post treat for you all today – a craft project from my photographer friend Claire who blogs over at Lacey in Places. She’s going to share her experiences of lampshade making with you and give us a step-by-step tutorial on how to do it ourselves. Take it
Well, the UK weather forecasters have been predicting a deep-freeze for a while now, with a freakishly low-temperatured cold-front predicted to hit the country this week – and for once they actually got it right – it snowed! At least in some parts of the country that is. When I wake
It’s a pretty dull time of year; everyone is back at work or school now, the weather is drizzly and grey, and the next payday seems a long way off. But don’t go thinking that you can’t afford a little treat to perk yourself up during ‘the most depressing month
Traditionally, festive decorations should be taken down by the twelfth night as Christmas comes to a close. There is a little confusion about precisely when the twelfth night is but according to the Oxford English Dictionary it is “the evening of the 5th of January, preceding Twelfth Day, the eve of the
Last year was really a significant year for my blog – I started writing more, taking more photos, chatting to my readers and other lovely bloggers and have posted pretty-much every day for the whole year! I started to take myself more seriously with my blog writing and I dropped the
After the excitement of Christmas and New Year, I’m settling back into my blog routine and here’s this week’s Tuesday Shoesday blog post – one day late on a Wednesday due to New Years Day yesterday! The Queen of Christmas is certainly the fabulously high-pitched singer Mariah Carey and I’ve
If you’re having a gathering for New Years Eve, be it a small family ‘do’ or a huge party with friends, you’ll be guaranteed to be serving and enjoying a few drinks during the evenings celebrations. You’ll need a selection of soft drinks, the odd lager and bottle of wine, but the
If you’re having a new years party and want to bake some treats yourself but don’t want to spend hours slaving away in the kitchen, check out this tutorial for creating impressive star-shaped tarts in super-fast time. Grab yourself a pack of ready-made puff pastry. Use the ready-rolled kind, or
I remember that not too long ago (well, in my lifetime at least) the January sales started on January 1st. We’d all have a proper week off over Christmas and the only thing you’d need to drag yourself out of the house for was a pint of milk and loaf
Of course, I couldn’t allow myself to get much closer to Christmas without posting a mince pie recipe for Pieday Friday and I’ve been baking a selection of mince pies this week, trying out different recipes and pastry effects. There’s no rules for mince pies and the prettier you can make them, the
I’ve been doing a mini-makeover on the living room of my new home this year and you may have spotted my previous blog posts about my retro-inspired interior design choices. This post is kind of about a few more retro items that I’ve picked up recently – a couple of
Me & my family have been advocates of the disgusting Christmas jumper for years, but over the past couple of Christmases the tacky festive jumper has really taken over the high street and has finally become fashionable again. Although I like the style of these festive jumper, I really think
Well, this Christmas is already turning out to be one of the best I’ve ever had – starting with an amazing visit from the Holidays Are Coming Coca-Cola truck to the nearby town. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw the event announced in the local newspaper (I actually
I was lucky enough to find this set of vintage RSPB placemats and coasters in almost brand-new condition at the Shakespeare Hospice Furniture Shop in Stratford Upon Avon and although I loved the autumnal bird design straight away, I wasn’t sure what I would do with them. I don’t often need placemats and I already
I recently veered off my usual route home and stopped by a local farm shop called Maple farm. I was expecting to find yet another swish ‘farm’ shop with shelves full of £5 chutneys, freezers containing the local butcher’s joints and workers in branded uniforms. What I actually found however
You may remember that last month I was considering a purchase of a new winter coat and I blogged about my shortlist – if you don’t remember check out the blog post here. Well, I tried on a few options and after much deliberation and weighing up of price, style
To create a cute pumpkin look for Halloween, and also for the upcoming bonfire night celebrations (I think my nails look a bit like a bonfire, no?), I tried out the new glitter varnish that I ordered last week from Avon. I painted a couple of coats of no 27 Orange
As you probably know by now, I am slowly but surely funking up my living room to create a kitsch 50s/60s/70s look and, as Lego was invented in 1958 and was the must-have toy of the time, I’ve looked into getting some bright & plastic-y Lego accessories. This Lego-brick CD
Its September and the new school term is starting, and for most of my life this has meant packing up my satchel (yes, I still have one) and heading off to school, 6th form, college and university. And I love this time of year. It’s a new beginning, with new
Today I’m off to Newmarket races for the day. I’ve never been before, and I have no idea what to expect and even less of an idea about what to wear! My generous brother-in-law gave me and my husband tickets for today’s race-day for Christmas – and to top it
I couldn’t quite believe the recent news that coffee-giant Starbucks is planning to open its first tea-only store in the autumn. The tea shop will open near the company’s headquarters in Seattle and will feature the US tea Tazo brand that Starbucks acquired over 12 years ago. According
