Outfit post c/o Westfield London

On Wednesday, I was invited to Westfield London for a 'How to dress for your body shape' shopping project. A project involving shopping? Just my sort of project and when I heard the other participants were Mademoiselle Robot, Alex Loves, Sherin from HiFashion and Nastaha from Girl in the Lens it was a bit of a no-brainer. I never expected to be treated to a shopping spree, but that's exactly what it was. Dream event.

We met in Bimba & Lola, the first UK-based shop for this luxe Spanish brand with beautiful shoes, accessories, bright basics and neutral, vintage-inspired dresses and blouses. I fell in love with their bags, some metallic pastel pumps and their brilliant customer service. The lovely people at B&L had given us £50 to spend there, so I chose a huge coral-coloured scarf printed with tigers and vintage ladies which I'll debut on here soon.

Next, it was on to French Connection for a snoop around and to pick my favourite piece. If I'm honest FC has never been a usual stop-off on my shopping trips, mainly because I'm scared of their sizes and their prices, I don't think I've ever spent £125 on a dress in my life. I found a pretty blue lace skater dress that fit just a little too snugly (wedding dress diet is ON) and with little more than a wave of a wand, the dress was mine. The photographer also took photos of me looking at things. It was a bit awkward. See above.

And finally we took a trip to Topshop where I was looking for the right jacket to pair with my dress. I decided on a slightly cropped faux leather number and a set of four amazing skull rings, all courtesy of a very kindly gifted gift card.

My post with tips of how to dress for my body shape will be up on their site very soon, but I thought I'd share the outfit here first. Thanks to Isa and Dearne for a wonderful evening!

Hastings, direct.

It was our four year anniversary on Friday so we booked £10 return tickets to Hastings and, thanks to Sarah's fantastic recommendation, stayed for two nights in Hastings House- a very pretty, seafront b&b with a mean line in free jaffa cakes and a very good fry up.

Yes, yes, Hastings wasn't the first place I thought of when imaging a romantic weekend away either but after hearing a few people mention that the charity and junk shops were plentiful and cheap, I managed to persuade Ed with the cheap train tickets and the promise of some beach-side walks. And I'm so glad I did. I totally fell in love with the place. It was freezing, below zero on the mornings we walked along the coast to the Old Town, with all the wonderful shops centered around George Street.

A pop-up junk shop in a very run down building- such a good idea to get using some of the abandoned and empty shops.

Butler's Emporium was, until March 2010, an old-school hardware shop packed full of tools and sandpaper. Now it's an amazing space filled with oddities, home wares and textiles. It's huge, with unfinished walls and nooks and crannies everywhere.

Early afternoon G&T at the Dragon Bar on George Street.

This was my outfit for a meal on the Friday where I ate eight (!) different types of seafood in two courses. Winner. I'm wearing a 1950's feather print tea dress that I bought from Beyond Retro on my birthday for £18.

And now onto my favourite place: The Imaginarium (sadly, it has no online presence): a shop within a shop full of taxidermy, preserved hanging bats, preserving domes, antique bird cages, bones, religious paraphernalia and some very lovely old embroidered samples. Unfortunately, unlike the rest of the junk shops, this stuff wasn't the cheapest, but I'll be back to stock up on something weird to add to my collection.

I though I'd end this with some dogs driving a van. Because your day can't get much better when you see something like this!

The Hitched List: A Trip to the Moon

Pictures from the following: 1, 2 and 3.

Last two: my own.

Trying to settle on a wedding theme without finding myself on a conveyor belt of corporate white chair covers, 'vintage'-looking decorations and a decision involving fruit cake and victoria sponge (FYI, I'm having both. At the very least) is one hell of a minefield.

Yes I want jam jars, wildflowers, bridesmaids in vintage lace dresses and heaps of fairy lights but I also want something different to tie everything together. A theme. Vintage is too vague a word and overused at best. Trying to describe to people that I want a slightly gothic, fairytale, pastel-hued affair with a dash of taxidermy and steampunk thrown in for good measure, really wasn't working. I've just started asking people to imagine Miss Havisham and her cobwebbed lace and bingo, that's the look I'm going for.

And then I found the postcard above and it all fell into place. I remembered seeing Georges Méliès 1902 film 'Le Voyage Dans La Lune' a few years ago and how it entranced me. It is considered the first ever science fiction film and runs to a little over fourteen minutes and was finally, 109 years after its original release, restored to full colour and shown at Cannes Film Festival 2011. If you have a spare quarter of an hour, watch the full video above.

I've decided on stars and moons and no particular era. I might have a fifties dress and twenties jewellery, a guest book from the 1890's and a DJ playing anything from the last sixty years, but everything will come together under a glittering sky. And yep, I do plan on making a two-metre high crescent moon prop to pose in.

Lace & Glass: an easy DIY

One item on my list of things to collect over the next 12 months in the run up to our wedding is jam jars. Or pickle jars, chutney jars, mustard jars, any jars that I can steam the labels off of.

There's a number of little uses I want to put them to on the day but this one was the starting point- lace tea light holders. We'd quite like hundreds in the garden for the reception, but I'm seriously doubting how much Bonne Maman my family and I can consume over the next year.

You will need:
Jars with the labels scrubbed or steamed off
Scraps of lace or pretty ribbon
Glue dots (can be bought on Amazon here)

Attach the glue dots at equal distance (approx 1 inch) around the top of the jar.

Cut the lace to fit around the jar to include a small overlap and press the lace around the jar onto the glue dots. Add extra glue dots to stick down the overlapping piece of lace all the way down to where the lace finishes on the jar.

Et voila!



They look even prettier with the tea lights in. I'm planning to make lots of them with different pastel-coloured lace and group them on tables and all over the garden so, if anyone eats a lot of jam, you know where to send those empty jars!

The girl with the curls: a mini how-to

As someone who publishes their email address for all manner of creep to see, the ratio of kranky/non-kranky emails I receive is suprisingly low. Mostly, I just get the nice ones and recently I've had a few emails about my hair, which may or may not be the handiwork of some fringe fetishist. Coincidently, I received an email from lovely Jilly on behalf of John Frieda regarding their new set of YouTube tutorials (on their new UK channel here)so I decided to kill two birds with one blog post and do a little tutorial on how I do my hair and some advice from the professionals.

Firstly, as you can see from the photos above in 1 & 2, my hair is embarassingly in need of a re-colour. I can't quite believe I'm even publishing these photos of my bog-brown roots.

It's not that I haven't got the time or the money (I usually use a box dye at home), it's because I'm attempting to give my hair a jolly good rest. I've been dyeing my hair since I was 15 years old (10 years!), from purple to black to red to orange, and in that time my scalp has become hardened to most chemicals I slap onto it. However, using the same dye I've used for over a year- L'Oreal Feria in Mango- I've started to get a tingly, stinging scalp. After reading the PPD/Resorcinol scare stories, I immediately stopped and am now stranded in a land of dark roots and fading lustre. There's nothing to be done but ride it out until I summon the courage to become a henna user.

My hair is naturally wavy (my Dad was the proud owner of a ginger afro in his youth), so I blow dry it using a paddle brush to smooth it out so that the curls take to the hair more (1). When I curl my hair, I split it into three horizontal layers and curl one at a time to add volume.

I've used curling tongs in the past and never liked the result they've given me, always too uniform and not particularly natural. When I started using my hair straightner instead, it was a revelation. With each layer, I take small, inch-wide sections of hair and starting at the top, nearest the scalp, clamp the section with the straightner (2). I pull down, rotating the straightner as I go, taking the pressure off about an inch from the end of the strands.

When I've curled each layer, it's much too perfect so I brush it all out with my Tangle Teezer, turn my head upside down and shake it all out (4). I'll apply a bit of hairspray (Tresemme's Freeze Hold is my current choice) and I've found the curls will tend to hold all day.

The California Waves video above shows you an alternative way of doing it with curling tongs if this is your preferred method. They also have a fantastic one for retro curls which I'd like to try out once I get my mitts on some rollers. Do you have any other tips for a natural curl? Perhaps you're a rag-rolling fiend or a connoisseur of bendy curlers, so whatever you're preferred method, let me know what I'm missing.

Mooching around London & a giveaway winner!

This weekend was one of those all-round fun ones with lots of things planned (that go to plan). On Saturday I met up with friends and their gorgeous little Shih Tzu Buster to go desk shopping in Islington.

Instead of scouring the junk shops we visited Criterion Auctioneers, an auction house on Essex Road with a huge floor of furniture and collectables. There were some lovely old pharmacy tins, a handful of gilded religious icons and old Elvis posters but I decided to be restrained and save my money for a fish finger sandwich and a cider at The Old Queen's Head where we sat amongst stuffed stags heads on the walls and glass domes filled with old doll parts.

I've blogged about my love for the amazing-but-expensive Camden Passage in Islington before so was more than delighted to take another stroll down it on Saturday. I spied a shop I've never seen before: Issy's Milky Way is a fifties diner and milkshake bar in a palette of pastels and stripes. We didn't get a chance to pop in but looking at the photos of their cakes on their Facebook page is making me want to make a date there ASAP.

The Passage also holds the fabulously weird stall outside Loveday Antiques which over time has become my favourite. This week, they were selling old incorrect education posters, bits of threadbare taxidermy, strange metal contraptions, some very steamy projector transparencies and all manner of small vintage toys.

The last photo, for those of you who are familiar with it, will indicate we ended up near Brick Lane browsing the Old Truman Brewery sample sales and sipping hot chocolate at Rough Trade. And still, after all these amazing shops and stalls, my purse was still firmly planted in my satchel. It was quite a novel experience not to be engulfed in a haze of post-spending guilt!

And finally, the winner of my phone cover giveaway is...drum-roll please...Jasmine from Jaz XO! Congratulations Jasmine, I'll be emailing you now. Thank you to everyone who entered!

An illustrated giveaway.

My old phone cover was looking a little tatty so when I received an email asking if I'd like to try our one of the covers from Iconemesis, my iPhone, in it's cracked Cath Kidston case, thanked me.

In collaboration with some of the greatest illustrators and artists around at the moment, they have created some truly desirable covers for both the 3G and 4G iPhones. I chose one of the many Fifi Lapin covers for it's pastel palette and thankfully it turns out to be as functional as it is beautiful.

Sturdy and well made, there are a huge range of other artists' to choose from- Gemma Correll, Cat Sims, Sarah King and Jonny Packham to name a few.

The very nice people at Iconemesis have also offered one of their lovely cases to one of you! All you have to do to enter is like the Iconemesis Facebook page, pick your favourite case design and let me know in a comment below with your email address. The competition will run until next Sunday 29th January and is open to all followers, including international ones.