A day of plenty

Hello there,

Firstly, thank you for all your lovely comments on my last post.  In the (too long) break from blogging, I pretty much stopped taking photos at all, but in coming back to the fold I realise just how much I enjoy it, and how important a part of blogging it is for me.  Taking photographs makes me really see things and I love it.

Secondly, welcome, welcome to my new followers.  It's lovely to have you here.

So, today, I have lots more photos of a market.  Because finally, I have uploaded my images of the vintage market I went to recently in Woodbridge.  Oh, my!  You know there are some days when you visit a flea market or vintage fair, when you traipse around scanning ahead from stall to stall and reach the end and wish you hadn't bothered?  Well, this was the exact opposite of all that.
  

It fell on a crisp clear day a couple of weeks ago and wandering around felt like being in the South of France.  Yes, really.

And even as I look through these photos, I see all sorts of things that I somehow missed ,and want to go back to.  But before you feel too sorry for the opportunity lost, let me show you what I DID buy....

I started slowly with this sweet little dish, made of Welsh pottery.  Love the flowers.  Love the dots.  Love everything about it really.  (And it didn't cost a lot.)

Then I spied these two lurking in the shadows.  No House by the Sea should be without them.

Then I happened upon a stall selling tiles made locally in the 1950s in my favourite colour of the moment.  (Can't seem to get enough of mustard...). 

By this point I was giving myself a stern talking to about the Age of Austerity ruling in the House of NKK etc, but the woman in the bird's nest hat simply smiled.

And that was my final purchase.  Final final.  Until I saw this.

Really, I shouldn't be let out.  Clearly, I cannot be trusted.  But in my defence, I defy any of you to have walked away without this beautiful blanket.  I know I should just have gone home and whipped one up myself.  But we all know how long that's going to take...  And this is made of pure wool.  And in such lovely colours.  And I couldn't buy more than a few of balls of yarn for the price I paid for it.  So really, it absolutely had to come home with me.  Don't you think?

So, now I need some advice, please.  As you can see, it's a little too small for our stupidly big bed (for which, I have Mr. P to thank).  And I am wondering about the best way to add to it.  I know I could just add to the border.  Or I could make granny squares in a single colour (probably either red or navy to tie the room together (in a non matchy match way, hopefully) and sew these in a sort of mega border around the outside, expanding the blanket by a granny square width all around, which I think might do the trick.  

What do you think?

C.x

PS the lovely Rebecca from Posh Yarn was there and I chatted briefly but then ran away in a fit of shyness (more of that another day).  Sorry.

Making Winter - A tale of three blankets

As no doubt you already know, Silverpebble and Thrifty Household have come up with the wonderful idea of sharing what we like about winter to banish any signs of gloom in the months of short days and long nights.  For me, winter is all about cosiness.  And cosiness requires blankets.

I have lots of catching up to do with all the posts I have in my head.  For ages, I've been wanting to show you this loveliness.

My Mum found this blanket in a charity shop and gave it to me just before Christmas.  Isn't it just beautiful?  It's in pristine condition and made of cotton, so we bunged it into the washing machine to get rid of the old lady whiff and it came out fresh and spotless. It makes me smile every time I go into that room.  And it's got a lovely weightiness to it that you need sometimes in a blanket.

You may remember that I wrote about coveting a blanket from The White Company here.  Well, they had a sale awhile back, just at the point when the House by the Sea was at its most chaotic.  Now, I had no business at all buying a blanket at that point when we were still at the stage of choosing taps, but sometimes a thing calls to you and you just have to answer the call.  This is the opposite of the white blanket; all gossamer lightness but deliciously warm for all that.  It's on our bed at the moment and keeps our feet toasty when the temperature drops in the small hours.

And then there is my blanket.  It's really not there yet.  In fact it's still a fairly random collection of squares.  But if I squint my eyes and ignore all the threads forget about how many hundreds more grannies I need to do to get it to the size I want, then I can almost see that it will be a blanket some day.

I'm trying to be good and do a granny a day, encouraged by the lovely Annie and Laura of Nimble Fingers and Steady Eyebrows.  And I've been pretty good so far and reckon on about 5 a week.  But we'll see.  

I'm also trying not to be too daunted by how big the bed is compared to each little square!  Maybe it'll be done by next winter.

C.x

Pure escapism

Recently, I've come across Anthology Magazine.  It's published every quarter and is absolutely delicious. 

                                                                                 (All photos from Anthology Magazine.)

                                                                                (All photos from Anthology Magazine.)

I have an idea to do a sort of 'sea wall' in our new house, full of all sorts of things from Etsy and ebay and flea markets  all loosely related to the sea.  But really, I just want to arrange for everything in this house to be delivered to my door.  Sigh.

And yesterday, they featured this collection:

(All photos from Anthology Magazine.)

Clearly, they are stealing my ideas :)

C.x

Hello Geronimo

 Hello everybody,

Thanks so much for all your good wishes after the wobble the other day.  It's bucketing down today and we're threatened with a tropical storm over the weekend.  All we need now is a plague to round things off...

And welcome to new followers.  Lovely to have you here.  I'm having a lovely time catching up on old blogs and finding new ones at the moment.   So much creativity out there.

Have you seen these button pictures?  Aren't they just the business?

Don't they make you want to reach for your button stash?

(I love that daisy button.  And the chandelier!)

And isn't this just lovely?

(Isn't that a fawn button for the eye?)

But my favourite one is this:

Just lovely.

These all come from Hello Geronimo (all images from their website).  My sister, niece (hello Isobel!) and I went to the South Bank while I was at home and they had this map in the window.  (I want I want I want.)

So which is your favourite?  And what picture would you make with your buttons?



C.x

I'm just saying...

As you may remember, I have been coveting the crochet throw from The White Company since I blogged about it here.

Well, The White Company is having a sale.  :)



60% off.

Sometimes it pays to wait.

C.x

Quilting for a cause

Hello everybody.

A lovely long and lazy weekend here - 4th July which means a day off.  Hurray!  We were also given early release from work on Friday.  (Lots of prison-like associations with that phrasing, I know.)  Anyway, I walked home, which gave me a chance to take in the windows of Saks and Anthropologie at a dawdling pace instead of whizzing past them on the bus.  In the bizarre world of fashion, it is winter, which means that the mannequins in Saks are all bundled up in woollen coats and cashmere jumpers.  Lovely, but a bit mad in 80 degree heat.  Apparently, there are women in the world who shop like this.  Personally, I need to feel the early morning chill of Autumn before i can think of the need for fingerless long wool gloves.  (The Saks mannequins tell me they will be big next season - you heard it here first.)

Saks had also devoted a whole line of windows to The Names Project.

I had a vague impression of this that I'd picked up from somewhere, but it's a powerful thing to see these displayed in a line together.  There's so much love and emotion packed into each one.

And they so vividly bring to life the people they commemorate.

So much life and loss and heartache behind each panel.

(I have sat for awhile wondering whether it's too insensitive a transition to go on from here to chatter on about Anthropologie.  But the truth is that it made me so happy to study their window too.  So much creativity and humour was just the kind of life affirming injection I needed.  Apologies to anyone who finds the remainder of the post in bad taste...)

So, to Anthropologie.  I find their window displays endlessly fascinating.

Who would think to clutter up a window with bubbles?  And yet it works.  And I just love the use of these old slides as the backdrop to a single outfit in the corner of this window.   How fab is that?!

Each slide offering its own tiny slice of life....

There's so much care and attention to detail that goes into these window displays.  But it's not often that I get to see it happen as I did on Friday.

Simple yet effective.

More creative food inside.  There isn't a single plate here that I'm not coveting...

And owls are definitely the bird of the moment.  They were everywhere.

I managed not to buy anything.  But lots of food for mind and soul.  All on the way home from work.

C.x

At it again

I have written before that my natural instinct is to looks to books as having the answers to everything.  I am busy decorating my little old lady house in my head (the finance and legal bods haven't registered the same sense or urgency), and I am accumulating a small collection of books to help me do this.  I love these books.  They confirm my view that it is cool to be rummaging through flea markets and craft fairs for that special something that speaks to me and will make our old lady house ours.  And they have such pretty pictures...

(if anyone knows where to get this picture of the Queen, I'd love to hear from you :)

This kitchen belongs to Aurelie Mathigot, the crochet queen, who seems to be able to make just about anything with a hook and yarn.

And I love this yellow collection where the grey slate is such a fab backdrop to the blossom and retro kitchen ware that you might not look at twice on its own.

I also crave the simplicity of this kitchen set up.  If and when we ever get this house, I'm planning on plain white cupboards to counter level and shelves on top.

I had vague impressions of this kind of collection for my own sideboard when I bought the Danish vase last week.  But the best thing about Decorate is that it has got me thinking about room plans.  So I have enrolled Mr. P to draw up rooms to scale and cut outs of our furniture so that I can literally play house.  A poor substitute for the real thing, but still...

I love this Ercol-style furniture, and have unearthed a fab nest of tables on John Lewis's website.  A girl can dream...

More cupboards with shelves overhead, this time from a house in Brooklyn...

And finally the clean lines of this house from Perfect English Cottages.

I know there are hundreds of websites out there with just this kind of inspirational content.  And I do look at them.  But to me, there's no substitute for settling down with a cup of tea or a glass or wine to lose myself in these pages.  I love the weight and feel of them, and how the content slowly reveals itself as I flick through.  And I usually have my ipad on hand to search on ebay or look up an idea if the inspiration hits me.  So hooray for books, I say.  It's also a little bit more than that.  In truth, I am having a shocker of a time at work at the moment and burying myself in these books, dreaming about my old lady house by the sea, is just the antidote I need.  If only the money and legal people could get their act together...

C.x