Gower holiday: part one

We're just back from another amazing holiday on the Gower coast. We first went back in October 2013 and fell in love with the stunning coastline. This time we stayed at Langland Bay, in a beautiful cottage overlooking the sea. It was amazing watching the weather change over the coastline & hearing the waves crashing onto the shore at night.

We packed lots of stuff into our four day holiday: digging on the beach, fishing with nets in rock pools, a coastal footpath walk, visited Clyne Gardens in Swansea, climbed a tower, drank hot chocolate in the sun & collected special rocks on the beach.

We did so many things I'm going to split the photos over two blog posts! These photos are of Langland Bay & our fun on the beach.

I'm linking up with the lovely Country Kids at Coombe Mill for this blog post

The Great Interior Design Challenge

I've won a prize! After taking part in a Twitter competition, my copy of the "The Great Interior Design Challenge" arrived last week. A few weeks ago I saw a tweet posted by @HabitatUK offering a copy of the #GIDC book if you could correctly identify the sofa featured on the front cover. I had a look through the

Habitat website (no great chore, I could look at it for quite some hours) and found the right sofa & posted my answer. I didn't think anymore about it & was extremely pleased to get an email saying that I'd won.

I really enjoyed the series and it has inspired me to be more adventurous and stamp a more individual feel on our home. It was also a great lesson in transforming a room on a very tight budget. Most people usually think "expensive" when they think of interior design, but the #GIDC series proved that with a bit of imagination & elbow grease, you can have contemporary and interesting design for minimal expenditure.

The book couldn't have arrived at a better time for us. We've lived in our house for just over a year & we've been redecorating virtually every room since we moved in. We've finally made a start on the room I was dreading the most...the kitchen. We've lived with the previous owners grubby, wonky & very dark tiles for the past fifteen months. It was time for them to go. The tiler who removed the old tiles said it was the worst tiling job he'd ever seen...so we were glad to see the back of them. The previous owner had tiled all the way to the ceiling and used a combination of lopsided white tiles above jet black tiles at the bottom. We don't have a big kitchen and the black tiles sucked all the light our of the room.

We've had fun choosing some beautiful new tiles. Whilst we loved the vivid yellow of the Mexican rustic wall tiles, we decided to go with a glossy sea green colour. I can't wait to see them on the wall...although bare walls are an improvement on the tiles that were there before.

I've already read the chapter on sanding wood floors in the #GIDC book and I'm hoping to make a start on the dining room and conservatory floors once the weather warms up & we can have some windows open. It looks like incredibly dusty work. We're toying with the idea of painting the floorboards white, but I think I prefer the warm tones of natural wood with a clear lacquer or varnish.

The #GIDC series also introduced me to chalk paint. Lots of the contestants used drab, second hand furniture and transformed it with a coat of paint. I am now a chalk paint convert & have painted an antique wardrobe. It now houses my vintage fabric collection out in the hallway. I've also bought a dresser to house my vintage china collection. Currently it is in the dining area, it remains unpainted whilst we complete the kitchen. But as soon as I get time, I will get the chalk paint out. At £46, it was a absolute bargain on Ebay. It just needs some TLC and it will look amazing.

I've also moved my computer down to the dining area next to the kitchen. This was partly out of necessity because my broadband signal wouldn't reach upstairs to my office. But, I'm happy with the way it looks and I'm going to hang a "Tiger Who Came to Tea" print on the wall above my desk. It is one of my daughter's favourite books and as I have aspirations to be a children's author, I hope it will inspire me every time I look up from the computer screen.

The Great Interior Design Challenge

Habitat

The Great Interior Design Challenge book

Vintage Love: scrap bundles and fabric pieces

I'm having a fabric clear-out!

First up is a fab selection of vintage fabric scraps.

Perfect for patchwork, mixed media art, scrapbooking, crafting projects, collages, dolls clothes.

Beautiful, bright vintage fabrics with eye popping prints & colours.

Each bundle weighs over 170g and contains pieces in all shapes, sizes and colours, one is made up of orange tones and the other is in shades of blue and green.

A real treat for vintage fabric fans!

Bundle of vintage fabric scraps patchwork, scrapbook, sewing, orange tones

Bundle of vintage fabric scraps patchwork, scrapbook, sewing, blue tones

Next up is a large piece vintage abstract, crazy, wild print fabric in yellow, orange, black.

Perfect for dressmaking or other craft projects. Bold colour palettes, large scale abstract prints & ornate accents are all over the catwalk this season.

Large piece vintage abstract, crazy, wild print fabric in yellow, orange, black

I'm also selling two pieces of this funky chiffon/sheer fabric

In fab 70s colours of chocolate brown, sunset orange and bright yellow

Very disco, very Studio 54!

Vintage sheer chiffon floral tropical fabric in orange, yellow and brown over 2m

Daffodils and rainy day activities

I haven't blogged for ages...we've all been poorly recently. My daughter had a temperature of 103 which is always scary, thankfully the paracetamol and ibuprofen kicked in and her fever calmed down. Turns out she had a nasty ear infection which has been resolved with antibiotics. I always find that illness knocks our day-to-day life out of shape for quite a while...particularly when I go down with same illness a few days later.

Currently my brain feels like a huge lump of cotton wool and I haven't had the energy or motivation to blog. But, when I became a Mum I soon realised that illness does not cut the mustard with children and you have to plough on even when you feel like crawling back into bed!

So we've been hand painting, cutting and sticking and admiring our daffodils planted back in Autumn.

Illness has meant we haven't ventured much further than our own back garden. But with the sun making an appearance and signs of Spring popping up here & there, it's one of the nicest places to be.

My daughter and I planted some bulbs back in September last year. They started to burst through the soil just before Christmas and are growing bigger everyday. Hopefully they will be flowering soon. I thing Spring bulbs are one of the most welcome sights after a horrible, wet Winter.

Weather and illness has dictated that we've spent a lot of time indoors recently. We've done lots of hand painting and getting the 'craft jar' out. Both activities involve lots of mess and fun, which we're big fans of in our house!

Hopefully we can stay lurgy-free for a while now and we'll be out and about more often...roll on Spring!

I'm linking up with the lovely Country Kids Linky at Coombe Mill

Chalk it up

Curiosity has got the better of me and I have succumbed to the chalk paint craze.

I've heard it mentioned in lots of blog posts, twitter discussions and on several episodes of the Great Interior Design Challenge on BBC2. I know that the Annie Sloan brand is the chalk paint of choice, so I took a trip to my nearest stockists and bought some paint and wax. I just had to see what the fuss is all about...

Lock, Stock and Sparrow is situated on the edge of Weston-super-Mare and it is well worth a visit. If I had a bottom-less bank account I would fill my home with their lovely stuff. They stock a mixture of restored, painted furniture and some pieces in their stripped-back, natural form. There are many quirky pieces, all solid and fantastic quality. Their sturdy selection of furniture makes flat pack stuff look a bit feeble...you know that each piece is an investment and will last for many years.

The guy we spoke to was very helpful, didn't rush us and showed us lots of pieces of furniture painted in a number of Annie Sloan shades, plus some Farrow & Ball colours.

I'm going to try the paint out tomorrow. My Gran has given me an antique wardrobe that has seen better days. Using chalk paint is supposed to be quite addictive once you start using it. I'm already eyeing up pieces of tired furniture that could do with a once-over...plus I'm looking at lots of furniture on ebay that I could give a paint-job to. I'm going to need a bigger house at this rate!

http://www.anniesloan.com

Lock, Stock and Sparrow

On your bike!

The United Kingdom has been battered and blown about by gales and flooding for weeks now. As a Brit you get used to the damp and dreary weather, but every now and again the wet weather takes a day off and lets the sunshine have a turn. Saturday was absolutely glorious. Beautiful Winter sunshine, bright blue skies...a perfect day to take our daughter's new bike for a spin on the prom.

She proudly calls it her 'big girl bike', it's an upgrade on the trike she's been pootling around on for about two years. It's got stabilisers (thank goodness) and brakes she can't quite master, which makes for concerned looks from other prom-walkers...but so far we haven't collided with anyone or anything. She has to wear a helmet for the first time, one with Mickey Mouse ears to be precise.

I know the photos look sunny, but believe me it was freezing, so we had a pit stop outside the cafe on the seafront. Hot chocolates all round, we needed the calories!

Despite my daughter's cavalier attitude to braking, we had such a fab time. Once she mastered the steering and strength needed to make a bigger bike move forward, she was off like a rocket!

And, for the first time in ages, we all got some serious exercise. Walking with a toddler or pre-schooler can be a slow process, not just because their legs are little, but because the world is such a fascinating place we have to stop to look at everything, question why this that or the other does X, Y or Z and generally take in life at a (sometimes) slower pace. I like to walk fast, when my daughter was in her pram and then her pushchair, I power-walked everywhere. I didn't have a car, it was better (and cheaper) than gym membership and it was quite possibly the fittest I've been in my life. But once my daughter got too big for her pushchair, we've walked everywhere at her pace. Which is lovely in one way, to slow down to little-legs-speed, but it's not been great for my fitness levels!

So it was such a joy to put her on two wheels and chase about after her on the seafront. It opens up a whole new world to us as a family. We can go further with her on two wheels. Once she is confident and we don't have to walk along beside her making sure she doesn't flatten anyone, we can get on our bikes too. And then we're really off!

Happy New Year? Not sure about that one...

Another year rolls around again...I'm staring at the start of 2014 and I'm not entirely sure what to make of it. 2013 was an eventful and at times very sad year for me and I'm still feeling the repercussions of events that took place. I also think this mid-winter time of year can make many people feel low. There's the lull after Christmas when all the decorations have gone and the bank account looks a bit bare. I'm not one to let myself get too down, but at the at the start of 2014, I do feel incredibly flat and unmotivated. It's really not like me, I like to press on with things and aim for goals. My crafting mojo seems to have deserted me at the moment and I'm really looking for something new to inspire and invigorate me.

I'm not one for New Year's resolutions, and despite feeling a bit glum, I do have some ideas for 2014...

* I've got a new found love of yoga and I like to follow my DVD once or twice a week. As a busy parent, I find just taking some time out for myself has a huge impact on my wellbeing. Plus I feel stretched, refreshed and relaxed after completing a session of yoga.

* I'm also toying with the idea of meditation. I know very little about it, but I've been reading a lot about "mindfulness" recently and I think meditation could help me with that. I'm often my own worst enemy, too hard on myself, too quick to criticse what I'm doing. Sometimes I just want the internal monologue to shut the heck up! So, meditation and lots of walks outdoors are on the list for 2014.

* I'm also really keen to keep up with my writing. I'm considering writing more parenting-based blog posts and may even start a new blog so that I can keep my crafting and parenting ideas separate. I feel the need to vent some stuff and I need a space separate from "Pouch" to achieve that.

* I've signed up for an online course in creative writing and I haven't had the time to embark on the course yet. 2014 is the year I *make* time to look at it! If writing is a dream of mine, then I'm the only one who can make it a reality. I need to stop procrastinating and get on with it.

* On the crafting front, I'm considering launching a range of personalised cushions. I've made hand embroidered wedding and children's birthday cushions for friends...but I'm not sure I want to leap into selling them. Making them has been a labour of love and something I've enjoyed making just 'for the fun of it'. I've been contacted by a wedding website about selling my cushions, so I know there's a market for it. But I feel like I need a break from sewing at the moment, like I say, my crafting mojo has done a runner at this present time, but we'll see...

* 2014 brings the year my daughter starts school. In nine months she will be in full-time education. I can't say that the thought of it doesn't break my heart, because it does. We've had such a blast over past few years and I'm going to miss her terribly in the daytime. But children grow up and it's the next phase of her life. And the next phase of mine and I need to find a focus for my time. So I'm going to be dusting off my CV, signing up for more voluntary work and maybe even embarking on some training.

So, onwards and upwards into the New Year!