Three Things Tuesday

S'up homies!

Are you having a good week? Mine has been tip top so far, for the three reasons mentioned below...

1. Surprisosaur
My working day got a whole lot better after a colleague gave me a completely unexpected dinosaur-shaped present! Eeep! 

He is my new desk mascot, and I have named him Garibaldi, because he reminds me of the illustration that accompanied one of my favourite childhood poems about a dragon who lived in a biscuit tin and ate garibaldi biscuits all day. No prizes for guessing why it was one of my favourites! (Side note- one of my other favourite poems is "When We Had Icecream" by Michael Rosen. Again, unsurprisingly, pudding related). 

I decided Garibaldi needed fancying-up a bit (there's nothing quite so dapper as a well dressed dinosaur, don't you know!), and this is what I came up with: 

Fancy pants party-time dinosaur. Fancy, eh?

2. Cartoon bags a-go-go
After seeing the lovely Kezzie sporting the most amazing bag I have ever seen in the history of my eyes seeing things yesterday, I knew I simply HAD to have one. Yes; it was very much a Veruca Salt moment, but with slightly less singing. Now I just have to narrow down my favourites of these mind-bending bags and pick the one I want to buy. *Sigh* Life is hard. 

3. THE GREATEST BARGAIN IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD
I decided to pop into the Steamer Trading Outlet shop near my house on the way home (the main reason I wanted to buy this house, to be honest :p) and spent ages rummaging through all the wonky salt mills and lidless Le Creuset pans to find some pretty random crap totally essential kitchenware that I didn't know how we'd functioned without before (I'm looking at you, avocado masher). 

In the end, all I bought was a Christmas tree cookie cutter (obviously) and some saucers. But these were no ordinary saucers. They were in the "everything is 10p" section, so buying 6 mix and matched ones only cost me 60p (Mathtastic, eh? I'm like Carol Vorderman. But with a less nice bum). When I got them home, I peeled off reduced sticker after reduced sticker until I got to the original price stickers. The total RRP for those six saucers? TWENTY FOUR ENGLISH POUNDS. 

I would put a picture of the saucers here, but they are just normal white saucers. Nothing exciting. So, here's a picture of a kitten in a teacup instead.

Katie xxx

P.S. Seriously- SIXTY PEE! *pinches self*

Six Things Sunday

Evenin' all

Have you had a nice weekend? Mine has been brimming with all of the ingredients needed for a blissful break- friends, family, Bananagrams, and above all (obviously) CAKE. Here are some of the things responsible for my cat-who-got-the-cream smile: 

1. Celebrating wonderful milestones with my family-in-laws
Tom's brilliant Grandad turned 90 yesterday and I felt very lucky to be included in the celebrations. And seeing him playing with his cute-as-a-button great-granddaughter totally melted my heart! 

2. Decorating with cake
Baked goods are my new favourite home accessory- although they don't last very long! (The brownies were baked by Tom's aunt for the birthday celebrations and were utterly AMAZEBALLS)

3. Surprise presents
I spent this afternoon in fits of giggles catching up with some of my oldest friends; reminiscing, playing rude-words-only Bananagrams and eating a lot of Smarties (see above... all gone now!) Jenny very sweetly bought me this beautiful compact mirror as a surprise present- to replace the broken plastic one I shared in this post. AND IT'S GOT A DEER ON IT. Win. 

4. Tom
To be honest, I could include Tom in all of my "Alliterative Number Of Things On This Day" Lists. But I don't, because that would be vomit-worthy. However,  I wanted to give him a special mention today because not only is he ruddy awesome (and an EXCELLENT maker of roast dinners) but just as I was thinking this morning that I really couldn't be bothered to do any pre-guest vacuuming, I heard him starting up the vacuum cleaner. We're, like, brain twins or something. 

Quite like this one; I think I'll keep him

5. Reading a good book
My friend Holly (another member of the Power 8) and I have started lending each other books after realising we have a joint love of several rather obscure sub-genres including bodice-ripping, crime-solving historical detective romances. It's really lovely to have someone to talk to after I've finished reading something, and I'm getting to discover some new authors I might have otherwise missed. 

6. Speakeasy Soap
After spotting this amazing idea on Pinterest the other day I've become slightly obsessed by the idea of decanting all of the liquids in our bathroom into beautiful booze bottles. Sadly, this will mean buying and drinking a lot of liqueur. The things I do for craft.... I will make sure to post pictures of the completed mission.

Katie xxx

P.S. A slightly sad note to the end of this happy list- RIP Dr Snow

Blog of the Week Number 4

Hello lovelies!

I hope you're all having a relaxing, adventurous, indulgent, heart-warming, sociable and creative weekend. Or watching endless re-runs of Come Dine With Me and eating handfuls of dry Cheerios straight from the box- whatever floats your boat!

This week's BOTW is the utterly stunning Tartine and Apron Strings, run by Jen. A new discovery for me via Bloglovin', and something a bit different from my previous BOTW choices (Katy, Katie, and Amber). Jen's blog is centred around recipes and photography, rather than craft projects and stories about cats. 

The very talented Jen from Tartines and Apron Strings

Food is one of my all-time favourite things in the whole wide world, to the point that Tom is always accusing me of loving chocolate more than I love him. Which is NOT true. But, thankfully, no-one is making me choose...

Pearl Couscous with Grilled Tofu and Red Peppers? Errr... YES PLEASE

Jen is hands-down one of the most talented food stylists I have ever seen; and has inspired me to stop photographing my lovingly-made dinners with my shoddy camera phone and just posting them to instagram. 

Is it possible to bake the sensation of a hug? Because I think Jen might've done it!

If you only do one thing this week, please read the About Me page on Jen's blog- her stories, and particularly the story of her grandmother, are so inspiring. 

Even though I'm vegetarian, I think these prawns on sunshine-yellow rice look incredible!

All images for this post have been borrowed from Jen's blog- please do go and say hello/drool over more pictures of muffins :)

Katie xxx

When Crafts Get Ugly

Hello lovelies!

It's Friiiiiiidddaaaaaaayyyyyy. Let's all just have a little smiley dancey moment for Friday. 

I want to have a little sharing session today which will hopefully make you smile. It's an unnecessarily honest post because (with the exception of those people who witnessed these failures who have already been threatened with a cake ban sworn to secrecy) no-one on the internet knew I had failed at these things and I could've just kept schtum. 

But then I thought- No, Katie. No. Share your failings with the world to make them grin and to break the last taboo, which is to show that craft projects do not always end in glittery, button-covered, wonderfully-iced perfection- despite what Pinterest tells you! 

So, here goes nothing- two of my recent crafty failings to feast your lovely eyes upon! 

First things first, I mentioned earlier in January that I was planning to trial my own version of Color Me Katie's rainbow flowers. I did everything I had to do, which wasn't exactly much; putting food dye in jars (the same dye I used to make my purplecakes) then sticking the flowers in. I waited, and I waited. I went to bed (at night time, not with craft-fail related depression), woke up in the morning and literally RAN down the stairs like it was Christmas to see what had happened to the flowers. The answer? Nothing. 

Well, actually- that's not quite fair on this little guy. I've had the flowers in the food dye since last Sunday, and this is STILL the only flower with any colour to it. I think the other flowers must be fasting or something, or perhaps allergic to e numbers.... 

Ready for craft fail number 2? This one is definitely more impressively rubbish. Ages ago the lovely Ms Swaine popped over for an evening of fabric-sharing, tea-drinking and gossiping about mutual friends (only kidding, guys- we just talked about Made In Chelsea for four hours). Fran blogged about her productive evening (you might've recognised me in one of her photos) and I was planning on doing the same until I made what turned out to be felt roadkill. 

My idea was to make a beautiful little fox plushie that looked something like this: 

But what I actually ended up with was this:

Ooops!

Just look at that special little face!

Special Fox is still alive(ish) and well- I use him as a spare needle holder (Way to kick a fox when he's down, right?! Spearing him in the face with a needle!) and as a reminder that sometimes things don't work out quite right (but can still have hilariously wonky button faces).

Have you had any spectacular craft fails you don't mind sharing? 

Katie xxx

Oh, Snow

Sometimes I love you, when you look like this- icing the trees with diamonds. 

Sometimes, I do not like you. When you make my journey home take TWO HOURS when it should've taken TWENTY MINUTES. Grrr....

Katie xxx

Three Things Tuesday

Three things make me feel all warm-and-gooey on the inside, like a melt-in-the-middle chocolate pudding.

1. Tea

C'mon people; who doesn't love tea?! Apart from my friend Sam, but I'll let her off because she is lovely and has excellent hair. 

2. Cable-knit Cardigan Joy

Those of you who follow me on Twitter may have noticed me going into meltdown on Saturday after I had to spend longer than any human being should have to in the depths of Urban Outfitters (aka The Hippest Place Around). I bought some unbelievably kitsch homeware in their January sale but didn't like it when it arrived, which presented me with two options: 1. Post it back to them at my expense (which probably would've cost me a billion pounds thanks to the price of today's stamps), or take it to the shop and hope my hipster allergy didn't flair up. Which it totally did after noticing all the girls wearing their beanie hats perched right on the top of their hair- not even touching their heads. 

Seriously, Hipster Girls, why do you wear your hats like this?! You are NOT EVEN FEELING THE BENEFIT OF THE HAT!!

Because I had paid with PayPal, apparently "UO" could only give me store credit. I could have waited and returned another day to it but I was already in so deep I could feel myself itching to get a tattoo of Andy Warhol's banana, so I decided to tough it out, find something as fast as I could, and never return again. 

When my lovely MIL bought me the cosiest cable-knit jumper for Christmas I had hoped it would satiate my knitwear lust. Instead, it appears to have fuelled it, and I ended up spending my store credit, plus a little bit more, on this beautiful cardigan after spotting it amongst all the weird three-legged trousers and boobless t-shirts on the sale rail:

This cardigan is really, really heavy, which makes it unbelievably cosy and also the perfect excuse for spending the entire day on the sofa asking Tom to please bring me lots of hot drinks and snacks - "I can't move; my cardigan is weighing me down!"

3. Pimping up my gas fire

Regular readers will have spotted my blog has been flooded with fridge magnet tutorials recently, after I became inspired to create a magnetic scrabble board for our house. I was planning to buy second hand scrabble tiles and fix the magnets to the back myself, but because the entire crafting world has become obsessed with scrabble tiles even second hand ones on ebay are ridiculously expensive. So I ended up buying two packets of these instead. 

Until I find the perfect frame to create my scrabble board, I thought I would use them to disguise the hideous gas fire in our dining room. This may not be the most practical makeover I've ever done; with all this snowy weather I'll need to peel them all off again if I actually want to use the thing!!

Katie xxx

Blog of the Week Number 3

S'up homies,

Welcome to the third installment of my new post series- Blog of the Week. 

This week's BOTW is the lovely and very well dressed Amber from Forever Amber. Combining hilarious honesty, Rubin-related anecdotes and a truckload of beautiful polkadots I find myself constantly snort-laughing when catching up on Amber's latest exploits. And, boy, does that girl know how to dress! 

Picture courtesy of Amber's lovely other half Terry who takes all of her blog photos. 

Sometimes I think about introducing outfit-related posts to my blog, but then remember you lot probably don't care I spend 90% of my time in the same three dresses and a dinosaur jumper. Side note: I have just realised I never posted a photo of my DIY-d dinosaur jumper on here. This is it:

Anyways, back to Amber. She has no problem sharing her victories and her catastrophes, her love of shoes and her hatred of winter, and stories about how she became locked in the bathroom. 

I find Amber's writing style absolutely inspiring and, even though I started blogging well before discovering her blog, it has influenced me to pour my heart and soul into writing as amusingly as I possibly can. 

Amber: inspiring me nameless people to start wearing nice clothes and brushing their hair since 2006.  

So, if you fancy a giggle and more pictures of pretty dresses than your eyes can handle, please do pop over and say "hello" to Amber. 

Katie xxx 

P.s. If you missed either of my previous posts you should be able to see them here

Timelapse Video

Hello lovelies!

Happy weekend to you all :) 

If you read yesterday's post you may have spotted I promised to share something completely different with you today, and here it is! Tom and I were deliberating yesterday whether to go out playing in the snow or do some winter wonderland photography. We ended up combining the two after Tom worked out how to make a timelapse video on his camera. Hurrah! 

It's actually really nice to see some footage of the two of us (although perhaps too much of the two of us- Tom's bum refused to spend the whole video in hiding!) because normally one of us is behind the camera. 

I hope you like it! 

Katie xxx

P.S. Sorry - this was meant to be published yesterday but the elves of the internet were obviously in a mischievous mood. 

Crafty Odds & Ends and another Fridge Magnet tutorial

Hello lovelies! 

Tom's birthday celebrations are still going strong (and by that I mean we're back to living our normal everyday lives, but every now and again I'll shout TWENTY NINE right in Tom's face), so I had today off work too. Hurrah! 

I decided to get my craft on today to make the most of being cosy inside during the snowtime outside. Side note- I found my diary from last year the other day and it said "I have officially become an Old Person because the first thing I think when hearing about impending snow is 'Well, that's going to make walking anywhere a total pain in the arse!'"

I decided to try my version of Color Me Katie's tutorial for rainbow flowers (in case you missed it, Katie is also this week's Blog of the Week), but decided to use just one colour per stem instead of four. In my naively optimistic way, I expected results in a matter of hours, but some swift Googling has since informed me this will take approximately 24 hours to happen. *waits patiently* *gets bored and wanders off* *comes back eating a biscuit to check on progress* *wanders off again*. I will post a picture tomorrow when the flowers are hopefully all brightly coloured and whatnot. 

I then decided to fancy up a couple of empty jam jars I had kept purely because I liked their lids. Tom bought me so many awesome crafty bits and pieces for Christmas, including metallic stickers which I thought would work perfectly as jar labels (I used some last Christmas to make gift tags too). 

Tom also bought me some awesome felt-textured frames for Christmas, which I decided to turn into some more DIY fridge magnets. The holes in the frames are rather teeny, so I filled them with little pictures cut out of magazines. 

I took photos to create a step-by-step tutorial for these babies, just in case you want to have a go too. 

You will need:
- Double-sided tape
- Magnets
- Magazines
- Deco felt frames

1. Choose some images from the magazines and cut them out (or you could draw your own pictures/use wrapping paper/photos etc.)

2. Stick the pictures to the back of the frames using double-sided tape. (N.B. The frames are actually self-adhesive, but I wanted to put them on the fridge using magnets so I could move them around.) 

3. Attach a magnet to the back of each frame.

4. Stick on the fridge and admire your handiwork. 

Katie xxx

P.S. Make sure to check back here tomorrow- I'll be sharing something completely different! :)

Wakehurst Place Revisited

Hello lovelies

Happy Friday Eve :)

As I mentioned in yesterday's birthday-related post, Tom and I spent a very enjoyable few hours yesterday morning stomping round Wakehurst Place. It was our second visit to the lovely National Trust park, and a completely different experience from our first (a warm, autumnal afternoon) because everything was covered in the most beautiful layer of glittering frost. 

Is it just me, or does this bud TOTALLY look like it has a nipple?

I know a bad workman blames his tools, but I am super jealous of Tom's photos from yesterday because he was using the mega-zoom lens which looks like this and takes the most amazing close-ups from miles away:

Just LOOK at Tom's photo of the pheasant compared to mine- and we were standing the same distance away. Beautiful, huh? :)

Katie xxx