Home-making, baking and faffing about

Was it really only last week that I was on holiday?   My first day back at work, predictably, was super busy but I managed to get completely up to date and there are now just three emails in my inbox which require attention today.  Smug.

We had taken an extra day off on Friday to finish off our holiday so it was nice to have a long weekend.  Having unpacked and tidied everything away the night before, we were able to spend Friday doing nice things.  We were up early and headed straight for Milton Keynes to run a few errands (returning library books etc) and drove from there to Bedford (with a takeout flat white, natch).  As regular readers will know, Friday is pocket money day (yay!) and I wanted to treat myself to some blooms from my favourite florist.  It's only a small shop but I spend ages in there in admiring the flowers and trinkets.  I chose a selection of country cottage-style flowers and they look beautiful on the dining table.

Of course, we nipped through Primark where I bought yet more pretty tea towels, PJs and a nice cheapy pair of leopard print ballet pumps.  By one o'clock we were safely ensconced in a nearby village pub, tucking into proper scampi and chips and downing large glasses of ice cold white wine. 

We picked up the pooch from my MILs on Friday night - as always, she was super happy to see us and looked pretty as a picture in a little pink bow  having been freshly bathed and trimmed the day before (the pooch, not the MIL).  

J was with us again this weekend and the three of us spent the whole time cosying up in the living room together, reading, watching Harry Potter movies and playing about with our phones/ipads.  We left the house just twice, both times to walk the dog.  If J eats well, sleeps well and gets a bit of fresh air when he comes to stay, I feel I've done my bit as a stepmum!  

It was nice to have time to mooch around the house with nothing very important to do.  As well as buying a proper bunch of flowers in Bedford, I also bought a couple of bunches of sweet williams at the Co-op and filled a few pots and jugs with them around the house.

I love this old marmalade pot I bought for pennies at a local antique centre but it isn't the most water-tight of vessels and I have to use this little vintage saucer/bowl thingy to catch the drips.

I have a teeny obsession with vintage Wee Willy Winkie candle holders

As if that wasn't enough, I came home to find that my sweet peas had positively blossomed and I was greeted by a tangle of colour and fragrance (cue: a happy little jig on the lawn).  Having been reliably informed that they will regrow with gusto if I snip, I (gingerly) chopped the majority off and filled a few vintage bottles with the stems.

There is a little posy of sweet peas on each of our bedside tables, too.

To my mind, there is no better way to bond with your home after a holiday than to fling open the windows, put out some flowers, make fresh coffee and bake a batch of something delicious.  I made plain scones to have with clotted cream and jam after lunch on Sunday:  always a crowd-pleaser and takes just minutes.

I store all of my ingredients in these jars on a shelf in the kitchen.  I think they look lovely, and a little bit 'homespun'! 

On Sunday evening I finally got round to applying floral decals to a couple of glass mugs that I bought ages ago.   I'm chuffed with the result.  I have got a large rose decal to use on a little milking stool that I bought and gave the Annie Sloan treatment to a while ago.  I'll blog that when I've done it, but I know it will look gorge!

So that's how I settled happily back into ordinary everyday life after a delicious week in the sun.  I started work yesterday refreshed, relaxed and raring to go.

Hope you had a nice weekend, too! 

Kisses.

Nicki 

x

PS - Sorry that I've just reused my Instagram images, I know it's a bit lame.  Sometimes it's just such a palaver to get my big girl camera out and the iphone is sooo easy to take little snaps of my life throughout the day.  I'll try harder next time :-)

A gorgeous vintage wedding and a little moan about the weather

I am a true English gal so I am going to start with a mini weather report.  It was appalling last week - not just rainy but extraordinarily windy too.  My carefully nurtured little seedlings have, for the most part, spent their first vulnerable weeks in the earth being battered by heavy rain and strong wind.  Every morning I've nipped outside in my jim-jams, anxiously checking for damage and tipping excess water out of the flooded vintage enamel trugs.

I am not enjoying this weather at all.  I am fed up with damp clothes drying all over the house, I am annoyed that I have to switch the lamps on before lunchtime and I generally just feel cross that flip flops, ice cream and heat rashes do not feature in my foreseeable future.  (Well, actually, that's a fib.  We've got a couple of holidays coming up, but you know what I mean.  I want sunshine at home! *wails*  In fact, I demand sunshine!  *stamps feet*)

♥♥♥♥♥

There is nothing quite like a forthcoming wedding to really ramp up the weather-related wobblies.  One of Andrew's oldest friends was getting married on Saturday and the wedding was one of the loveliest I've been to. (And there was no rain!)  I hardly took any photos because a) I was too caught up in the emotion of the day, b) the only camera I had with me was my iPhone and c) it was so windy that I had to hold down my dress to save flashing my [enormous tummy tucker] pants at passers by.  So I'm afraid that you will have to just take my word for it that the wedding was beautiful.  

Imagine a very slender and strikingly attractive bride in a creamy silk vintage sheath dress, her hand-span waist accentuated by a plain silk belt and diamante buckle.  She wore a little fur cape over her shoulders and just an embellished silk hairband to set off her thick blonde hair which was pulled into a low side ponytail.  She carried a posy of flowers that looked as though they had just been plucked from an old English garden and the shoebox-sized church was filled with peonies, roses and candles.  She and her husband (tall and handsome in a grey suit with bright pink socks) grinned from ear to ear all day.  It was such a treat to be part of their special day.

The reception was held in a black barn deep in the Suffolk countryside and a vintage double decker bus was hired to drive everyone there from the church. (They travelled separately in a chauffeur-driven pastel green classic VW camper van - so cool!).  Inside, the barn was gorgeous.  There were fairy lights and tea lights everywhere you looked, the table decorations were an electic mix of vases and old bottles filled with pale pink blowsy blooms.  If only the silver window vase on one of the tables had fitted in my clutch bag! :-)   We drank plenty of fizz, ate the biggest strawberries I've ever seen and washed down huge chunks of chocolate wedding cake with tea drunk from vintage china.  

The bride and groom have been together for ever having met in Australia when they were both on their travels.  When the groom, as part of his speech, thanked his parents for lending him the money to go to Australia, all those years ago, I felt a lump in my throat.  Aw!   

But every wedding needs a few minor incidents to make it memorable.  I will never forget the best man's speech which was shocking and hilarious in equal measure.  The entire wedding was translated into sign-language by a lovely jolly-looking grey-haired old chap and I still chuckle to myself now when I imagine how he interpreted some of the more 'blue' stories!

♥♥♥♥♥

So the jubilee bunting has been packed away and it's back to a full 5-day week at work for me this week.  Our spa membership is proving worthwhile so far - we've been a few times already.  In the evenings there are very few people and we often get the swimming pool entirely to ourselves.  RESULT!  The jacuzzi outside is uh-mazing and one of the other members told me last week that it's even lovelier out there when there's snow on the ground so I'm quite looking forward to that this winter.  I'm having my gym induction on Wednesday lunchtime and so don't expect to be fully mobile until the weekend afterwards.  I am ridiculously feeble in the gym.

Have a great week! 

Nicki 

x

Living in a wonky cottage

I think I have mentioned before that we live in a crumbly old cottage:

 (I can't dwell on this photo because the gaps between some of the stones freak me out, like the Big Bad Wolf could huff and puff and blow my house down.  Gulp.)

I love this little house.  I may have said before but it's actually a pair of very small cottages which were knocked through to make one house about 25 years ago.  One of the cottages that makes up our house is Grade II Listed, the other is not. The house, as a whole, is on a slope so although we have just two bedrooms we kind of have five floors/levels sometimes with just one room on a floor.

The house has bags of character; exposed stone walls in places, wooden beams everywhere, an inglenook fireplace and a vaulted ceiling. We bought this house because we love these quirky features.  I also love the sense of history here.  The deeds and other papers for the house were sent to us in a huge box and it was fascinating to read through some of them - we learned that the house, many years ago, was sold by auction at the local pub.  That amuses me.  I like to imagine a pickled old man, possibly a farm-hand, who staggered slowly home after what was meant to be a quiet drink in the pub before his tea.  He gets to the front door, cap in hand, scratching his head and greeting his wife... "you bought what??" she yells... Ha!

So old places are generally, to me, great.  Very occasionally they are not so great.  The walls in our house are mostly covered with artex which I'm not all that keen on but can't face the huge expense and disruption to have it removed.  Now that summer appears to be on its way out, and the temperature has dropped, the house is freezing.  I put the heating on for a short burst the other day (I know!) and we now have to light a fire if we spend any time at all in the living room.  We have to work really hard to keep mice at bay, especially at this time of year, and the conservatory roof has developed a leak.

The thing that I'm struggling with at the moment, though, is the wonkiness of the place.  (Is wonkiness even a word?)   The walls are uneven.  The floors are not level.  The ceilings aren't level either.  Nothing in this house looks straight.  Mostly I live with, and love, this fact but it has has been further highlighted today by the delivery of a lovely new dresser for the dining room (yep, the revamp has only just begun and the first piece of furniture has been delivered, slightly earlier than anticipated!).  We've popped it in the corner, where it will live post-revamp, and it fits perfectly (hurray!) but it looks so wonky:

See!  The floor slopes horribly.  I suspect the ceiling isn't ever so level either.   I just don't quite know how to straighten it up properly.  If you have any suggestions I'd love to hear from you - perhaps you have a similar issue at your own place?

I'm sorry for the slightly too 'real' rough and ready photo of the dresser and messy dining room.  We're selling all of our existing dark wood furniture on eBay so the room looks like a store room right now.

I know we all like to dream and swoon over other people's photos on our blogs and I can promise some prettier photos later in the week, if you'll bear with me.  My utility china collection is building nicely and I made a few fab purchases at local charity and antique shops over the weekend so I'll leave you with a taster of what's to come:

The husband couldn't understand why we need an old jam spoon, pickle fork and bread fork:  men really are from Mars.  ;-)

Nicki 

x