Some winter warmth

The cold snap that's hit London in the past few days has me looking back through my photos to find a bit of cheer in the cold grey days of January. Here are a few of my favourites from December to warm me up a bit.

A low-key Christmas Day was spent with friends and their kids at their house. I had fun styling the table for lunch, using a wreath and gorgeous silver candelabra as a centrepiece.



Our post-Christmas trip to visit family in Wales involved lazy days spent snoozing by the fire, reading, playing Monopoly and feasting my tired eyes on all that green countryside.


Christmas-y Crafts

Some pretty porcelain ornaments from Have You Met Miss Jones and my collection
of German wooden ornaments jazzed up our mantlepiece this Christmas.

It's December 13 and I've only just started any form of Christmas crafting. Talk about missing the post boat. Noone got a Bonnie-crafted gift this year. But I have managed to do a little crafting today, just to get me into the swing of Christmas (as if all the mulled wine wasn't doing that already!)

our music-themed Christmas wreath pretties up our awful navy blue front door.

I whipped up this wreath to hang on our apartment door and it took me all of 72 minutes! Seriously high on the instant-gratification ratio. :)

Step 1: find wreath-like shape. You could form it out of newspaper, cut out a cardboard doughnut, or buy a foam wreath. I managed to put all our cardboard in the recycling, so didn't have any to hand except the inner tube from the Christmas giftwrap... I unrolled it, stapled the ends together to form a circle and Santa's your Uncle - a wreath-like shape!

Step 2: Cut out lots of leaves from an interesting paper. You could use sheet music like me, or an old book, or some pretty wrapping papers. This was 3 sheets worth of music and made a wreath about 30 x 30cm.

Step 3: Get out the hot glue gun and start sticking the leaves (previously folded in half, to add some dimension) around the wreath, working your way around in one direction to get that smooth flow happening.

Step 4: Add a few Christmas-y trinkets, in this case some oven-dried orange and lemon slices, (or leave it plain if you like that look) and a ribbon to hang 'er by and you're done!

And here's my attempt at a Christmas tree for this year. I don't feel like I can splurge £20 on a little tree that I only need for 2 weeks. Had I been more organised and bought one on December 1, I'd feel a bit better about, but £20 for 10 day's worth of tree wasn't doing it for me. So I went outside and gathered a few branches. Bound together and popped in a pretty Ikea pot they're the perfect foil for our collection of ornaments. I'll definitely be more organised next Christmas and will buy a lovely fresh tree - the smell is heavenly - but this will suffice for this seriously-disorganised Christmas.

A Very London Christmas

The Christmas season is in full swing, and this morning we had a brilliant all-ages carols service at church. It was packed with kids and families. Hopefully the more grown-up one this evening will be equally full. It's fantastic to hear everyone singing together, and 'In the Bleak Midwinter' makes so much more sense when it's not 30ºc!

Car Boot Sale

I've discovered car boot sales and they're AWESOME.

Basically they're the English version of an Aussie garage sale, but with hundred of vendors all in the one location. I traipsed out to Wimbledon yesterday morning in the freezing cold (this an not an Aussie exaggeration - there was frost on roofs and cars and frozen puddles on the footpath!) and wandered around in an industrial estate looking for the greyhound racing track. Sounds appealing doesn't it?! It was as cold and grim as it sounds, and with some stalls selling the bottom of the barrel trash you could get discouraged, but then you find the odd gem and it's all worthwhile. Here's my little haul:



An empty picture frame (£4), an old piece of sheet music (£1) and a vintage map & atlas of Birmingham(£1). The frame became some great jewellery storage, the sheet music's funny front cover will be framed and hung on my wall, and the pretty pink, blue and green street maps will be put aside for future crafting goodness.


So here are my supplies for the jewellery storage frame:

Second-hand frame, paintbrush, white paint, duck-egg blue paint, hook and eye screws, mdf board cut to size by the lovely and very patient man at the hardware store.


And after painting the frame blue & the board white, measuring necklaces and earrings and screwing in the hooks (for necklaces) and eyes (for earrings and brooches) here's the final product!
I'm pretty stoked with it. It's an added spot of colour on the wall, frees up space on my bedside table, and un-tangled my jewels. A win all-round!

I do think I'll wait until spring though before going car-boot-sale-ing again though! My feet only narrowly escaped frostbite this time.

London Pad

I bought this cute doiley clock from Uncommon on etsy today. I think it'll look great in our little studio and as soon as I finish that headboard project I'm working on, I'll post some pics of the place.

Mitford Geekiness

Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire

The organisation I work for is fundraising for an aid project at the moment, and we've written to everyone who's ever been involved with us to donate. And that includes the occasional Dowager Duchess!

My mum loves all things Mitford and has read (I think) every book written by them and about them. There were 6 Mitford sisters - all incredibly unique and equally fascinating. Diana - a great beauty, who married British Fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley; Nancy - incredibly funny and clever author of some of my favourite books and movies (inspired by her childhood and early-adulthood), Jessica - who was also a writer and a communist; Pamela - who loved domesticity and country life and shunned the fame her sisters enjoyed; Unity - a devotee of Hitler and fascism, who attempted suicide at the outbreak of WW2, devastated that her idol and her homeland could be at war; and Deborah - the baby of the family, who became the Duchess of Devonshire, rescued Chatsworth and turned it into a successful enterprise.

As you can see I'm pretty interested in them too, so it was exciting to get a letter from the secretary of Deborah, Dowager Duchess of Devonshire today!!! It's not even the Duchess herself, and I'm squealing like a schoolgirl. But she is an amazing person, and it's yet another example of the books I love coming to life in this amazing country. I would never have recieved a letter like that had we stayed in Australia!

Is it cheating just to post photos?

A foggy Sunday morning in Hyde Park

Our church, looking oh-so-pretty and festive with Holly in the foreground

More of the church. It's got a stunning cottage garden all around it. I got there a bit early on Sunday and there were little birds flitting in and out among the plants. I even saw a Robin!