My little flower fairy turns one

It was Nell's first birthday last week (boo hoo!) so we celebrated with a little family party at the weekend.

  The theme was flower fairies and Nell looked lovely in her pretty dress and tiny wings.  She didn't keep them on for long but I managed to get a couple of photos!

I had fun finding fairy themed gifts for the party bags which I packaged up in pretty paper bags decorated with mini doilies, ribbon and a flower fairy tag with each child's initial.  Even the boys got one of these very girly bags but I did put boy stuff inside so hopefully they can forgive me.

My sister made some chocolate cupcakes and I made toadstools from fresh strawberries and mini marshmallows to go on top.

My sister also made the fantastic toadstool house cake.  It was a crime to cut it.  We did though.

Pretty fresh flowers on the food table.

Three days later I haven't taken down the honeycomb balls or bunting yet.  They look lovely with the green kitchen walls and its nice to feel festive while eating breakfast!

For the food I went tea party style with 6 kinds of sandwiches and finger food followed by scones, macaroons, cakes and biscuits and yummy fresh berry cones.

I think the birthday girl enjoyed herself - Its hard work turning one!

Corners of calm

Don't let these pictures fool you - the whole house does not look like this - but after 3 weeks and a lot of hard decorating work we are finally starting to carve out some corners of calm amongst the chaos.

Just the hall and girls bedrooms to decorate now, which should be the most fun to do. I have finally almost finished the Daisy chain sampler (I'm on Z!) to go up on the nursery wall.

Just need to get it all done before baby arrives!

Etsy eye candy

I am cameraless this week and therefore photoless of any of my own new creations. Instead here are a few lovely things from my Etsy favourites:

Tea bag holder from Kims Little Monsters

Hello greeting card from Tea & Ceremony

Animal pillows from Vintage Jane

Lovely lovely!

A persons a person, no matter how small

And a certain small person in this house celebrated her 2nd birthday last week.

We started the celebrations with a trip to Peppa Pig world the day before. Although it was quite a stressful experience I would recommend it for any serious Peppa fans. But go on a week day. During term time. In the winter.

We spent her birthday itself as a family opening presents and going to play group (its what she said she wanted to do!) and saved the festivities for the following weekend when we had... a Cat in the Hat party! We held it at my mums, 2 hours away from where we live and only arrived about 20 mins before the party was due to start with decorations to put up and a cake to decorate so please excuse the hurried quality of the photos - it was a little stressful to say the least! Everyone had fun in the end though. Here are a few details:

The birthday girl of course wore her Cat in the Hat dress - and I would like to add she wasn't really wearing purple crocs with it, they were just for playing in the garden.

I made banners to put up along with some red and white balloons.

The colour scheme was a Dr Seuss style red, white and turquoise including stripy paper straws which I have been waiting for an excuse to buy.

We ate green eggs and ham. I made green devilled eggs which were supposed to be beautifully piped but as I say we had about 5 minutes to prepare before guests arrived so when a bit of yolk got stuck in the piping nozzle I gave up and just spooned the filling in.

I also made purple cupcakes as an homage to the film version rather than the book as we watch it on a regular basis!

I couldn't get a good picture of the cake although that may be for the best - it was iced at speed. I was pleased with the bunting on top though. And Bea liked it which was most important!

A very tiring but very fun week!

The best room in the house

I thought I would take a few photos of Bea's nursery while it was tidy! Its my favourite room in the house and we had lots of fun decorating it before she was born and have continued to add things ever since. We rent so were restricted in what we could do but I thought I would share a few details here:

Here is her bed where she spends (most of) the night. It has a Cath Kidston spray flowers bumper and I made the matching hearts at the end of the cot.

We bought the little shelf/photo frame at a craft fair last year and her little coat and dressing gown look so sweet hanging there. The candle on the chest is Yankee Candle Baby Powder which is a much loved scent in this house!

Here is the Lloyd Loom we restored last year with matching spray flowers fabric and although you can't tell here, the curtains are white broderie anglaise. I have put the quilt I made on the back of the chair as it can feel a bit chilly at 3am!

And this is the other side of the room with changing table and Gisela Graham growth chart picture frame that we still need to put photos in!

Toadstools

I have just added a new cushion cover to Little Green Button. I do love a cushion cover - both making them and using them. They are a great way to add a bit of colour to a room or tie a theme together. This one has toadstools on. I also love toadstools!

You can buy it here.

Happy new year!

Hello! Happy 2010! I'm back, and my new year's resolution is to post more regularly!

So to start things off here are some snaps of one of my fave christmas presents - a little metal bird tealight holder. He is white really but looks dark here with the light behind.

He is hanging merrily in the kitchen window, currently looking out on the neighbours snowy garden!

Two sites I'm loving today

I've just come across these gorgeous prints by Peagreen:

I think this owl (£45) is my favourite.

I'm also loving EVERYTHING on Lapin and Me:

Dear Father Christmas,

Can I have all of the beautiful things please?

Thanks

Love Julia

Quilting

My latest project for the nursery is a decorative quilt for the cot. I have never made a quilt before but am enjoying the process so far. I will have to get a move on though as we only have about 2 and a half weeks to our due date!

I am keeping it quite simple with patchwork squares and some appliques. Hopefully it will be finished soon and I will reveal the whole thing!

Blood, sweat and Lloyd Loom

We bought this 1931 Lloyd Loom armchair in Newmarket a few weeks ago for the nursery. It was badly painted in a light blue and had a few areas of damage to the weave but as it was just the shape we had been looking for we decided to do it up ourselves.

It was a bigger job than we thought it would be! The cleaning up and repairing of the weave wasn't too bad apart from poking out all of the old paint clogs with a palette knife and screwdriver, but when we started painting we realised it wasn't going to be as simple as we first thought. We ended up painting the entire thing with tiny water colour brushes as we found it was the only way to get the paint right into the weave without clogging it up. I don't even want to try and work out the hours of labour it took! When you're eight months pregnant you do not want to be sitting on the floor with big swollen feet at 10 o'clock at night painting a chair with a miniature brush!

Finally we got it painted just before losing the will to live and I have made a new seat pad and matching cushion and got it settled into the corner of the nursery.

We love it and hopefully baby will appreciate all our hard work!

New Birds

We had to postpone valentines day this year as I was too ill to even buy a card for my poor husband but now I'm pretty much back on my feet we decided on a way to celebrate.

Last Saturday we went down to Upper Street and chose a print to go with this one.  We have had a second frame ready and waiting for ages so it is finally filled.  Both prints are by unknown artists but are very similar in style.  They look pretty good together!

Our tree!

Let me introduce you to some of the temporary additions to our living room that will be joining us for the festive period:

This is our tree! The husband would have liked a bigger one but as I had to pick it up by myself in a fiat punto, 7' was about the biggest I could manage!  We decided to go understated with silver and gold for the decorations, with a couple of special pieces.

Like this crocheted angel from our favourite Cath Kidston!

We have also decided to start a new christmas tradition and picked out a glass bauble from Liberty.  We plan to do the same thing every year and build up a collection of lovely ornaments that will remind us of the year we bought it.  So this is the bauble from the year we got married!

We got this garland of white metal tree shaped lights from Laura Ashley and they look lovely round the mirror.  For some crazy reason there is no fireplace in our living room which we really miss at times like this so we just have to make do with decorating the mirror!

They cast a cosy glow at night.

Nearly time for the tree...

We will be getting our tree this week so I got the christmas decorations box down and dusted it off to see what we have got in there...

Our whole collection is made up of things from the years I lived with my sister and various other girls and frankly we could do with some more impressive baubles for our first christmas as husband and wife!

Maybe something like these bell hearts from Graham and Green

Or these cute gingerbread house candles from Oliver Bonas

I think we need to go shopping...