Not Quite Christmas.

Another quick little post about something I've made recently to clutter my room up with!

I've seen many kits for making your own floral paper chains, but it's really just strips of overpriced paper so I thought I'd make my own. Only I didn't have any floral paper so I used fabric stuck to card (much more stable then as well, although quite heavy to hang up!) I also had to use staples to hold the strips together which aren't very attractive but you can't really see them when they're hanging up.

Rosie.

I'm broke. With 3 weeks until pay day.

But look at what I've spend my money on...it's so lovely :)

(also ridiculously girly, but I don't care! I love it)

Bed: 

Rosie Low End Metal Bedstead - John Lewis £349

Bedding:

Blush Scarlett Collection - Dunelm Mill £5.99 - £24.99 (although I got 20% off)

The smaller pillows I've had for years. One is handmade and the others are from various different shops.

I'd been looking for a small double bed for my room for ages, and I finally found one I liked from John Lewis but it was always out of stock, so I bit the bullet and just bought a full sized double instead. With the mattress it came to over £570! Eek! And then it took me a couple of days after putting it up to find bedding I liked. I was tempted by this one from Next but finally fell in love with the Blush Scarlett Collection at Dunelm Mill (very similar to the Next one with the 3D flowers, but a heck of a lot cheaper! The whole set at Dunelm Mill - duvet cover, sheet and 4 pillow cases came to under £55 (in the sale) whereas just the duvet cover at Next was more than that!)

I've put my feather fairy lights that I got from Tesco donkeys years ago back up because I don't have any space for a bedside table to put a lamp on. It's also going to really annoy me that the shot glass shelf I had my dad put up in the middle of the wall so it would fit with a double bed, doesn't actually line up with the middle of the bed! I could move the bed across a little bit but then there'd be a gap between the bed and the wall and that would bug me even more.

So my bedroom is almost complete now! I just want some sort of storage box to sit at the end of the bed (got to find somewhere to put all the handbags I had under my old bed) but they're proving difficult to find, and I don't want to spend more than £100 on one. Oh and I'm thinking of a little corner shelf for above the bed, just somewhere to put a glass of water and my glasses when I'm sleeping.


Having spent all my money on this bed, I now can't afford any of the Photojojo goodies I just blogged about on 27 Kodak Moments :(

Final Weekend of Freedom!

Ok so this was my last weekend of freedom before joining the real world and starting my new job (9am tomorrow, having to go to Basildon for training, which will take about an hour in rush hour traffic, boo :P) I therefore tried to make the most of it and get everything I wanted to do done.

SATURDAY

Popped into town with my Dad in the morning. I tried to get my Olympus Trip 35 fixed (the shutter release button has fallen off) but the camera guy couldn't fix it so that sucks. It still works, but I have to use a paintbrush to push the shutter down. Ran a few more errands, including stocking up on Kodak film from Poundland. This is how my box of films looks now:

Bit ridiculous I know. There's about 30 films in there now as well as 5 disposable cameras.

The Happiness Jar I mentioned in a previous post is coming along nicely. I originally bought a jar typically used for jams and preserves, but then found this pink one in TK Maxx and decided I liked it better, so swapped them over.

Also, my sister had a look through some of the quotes and lyrics that are in the jar and declared that most of them aren't actually very happy but oh well, I like to read them anyway.

The frame wall I've been working on is finally up!

Some of the frames are still empty and there's one still with a black and white photo that I want to change to sepia tone (although I can't find the original photo to edit so I may have to just use a new one altogether) oh and the big white rectangle is where my degree certificate is going once it's been framed, but I think it's coming along quite nicely! And the two little white squares are mini canvases which I eventually want to paint on.

SUNDAY

My dad took me to Battlesbridge Antiques Centre where I ended up buying six old postcards (some date back earlier than the First World War!) and I put some of them in the frames on the wall:

I found out that the girl in this postcard is Marie Studholme, an actress born in 1872 and popular in Victorian and Edwardian musical comedy. Cool huh?! Wikipedia also says that 'her attractive features made her one of the most popular postcard beauties of her day', so I'm guessing this isn't a very unique postcard, but I like it all the same!

Most of the postcards had messages on them, some incredibly difficult to read! Is it a coincidence that they were all written in loopy, italic script or did everyone write like that 'in the olden days'?

With a couple of the other frames I just decided to use some floral fabric:

Last but not least, the real reason we went to Battlesbridge - I wanted a new [old] camera :) It's my birthday on saturday so I was going to treat myself, but because it's my birthday my dad bought it for me. Result! After utilising his expert-ish knowledge (certainly more than I know) on cameras, I left with this Praktica L2. I won't know it actually works until I've run a film through it and gotten it developed, but it makes a great noise when you pull the wind on lever thing (I did say I don't know anything about cameras!) and when you press the shutter release, so I know I'm going to love playing around with it!

He also bought me another lens for it :)


Another thing that's kept me busy this weekend is the blog I contribute to, 27 Kodak Moments. The girl who runs it, Louise, realised the page layout didn't fit properly on a PC screen so tried to redesign it but just ended up in a confused mess so I took over on that! It looks much better now I think, I went all out with photo links to the photographers we've featured, as well as a photo wishlist for all the cameras we want! Well, mainly what I want. Louise has pretty much let me have free reign over it as she works a lot and doesn't have a lot of time for it. Although now that I'm going to be working full time I'm definitely going to miss the freedom of not having set days!

So that was my funpacked weekend! My friend Fiona just left, she also works at the company I'm starting work for tomorrow so she's been giving me some tips and stuff :) it's just learning about the business tomorrow anyway so I don't think I'll have to do anything too difficult on the first day. Then I just have to learn stuff about finance. No idea. Wish me luck!

Frame Wall.

I'm currently redesigning the wall above my bed. I've had six photo frames up there for the last few months but I've been collecting a variety of different frames and pictures etc to try and mix it up a little.

These photos (all found on we♥it, but some of them not recently so sorry for not knowing the original sources) give the kind of idea of what I want the wall to look like:

It's that random, mixed up, wonky, vintage kind of look.

So this is the wall space I have:

There's also this bit on the back wall with my shot glass collection that I'm thinking of having the frames run over onto.

(I'm meant to be getting a bigger bed, which is why the shelf isn't central to the bed but to the wall - it really annoys me!)

Ideas for the frame layout:

1. 

This one doesn't include all of the frames I have, and it's on a bit too much of a slope for my liking. (The sheets of paper are from when I couldn't be bothered to take the other frames off the wall, but I soon realised it wasn't giving me a good enough idea of what the wall would look like)

2.

I quite like this version, I think it uses all the frames. I don't like the one on the very top left though, I think it looks out of place.

 3.

It's going to be either this version or version 2, can't quite decide.

Now I just have to decide what to put in each frame! Most of the ones above aren't photos of people, more like arty things and drawings and pretty flowers and stuff, so I think I'm going to go down that route. A couple of the frames have embroidered text in them and the embroidery hoops are just fabric (see them in more detail in my previous post), and the largest portrait frame is going to be my degree certificate (I haven't gotten it framed yet so I'll need to wait and see how big that frame is, it's place is currently being held by another frame from my room) so I think it's best if they're not photos of people. I've got plenty of other frames round my room for that!

Just FYI, the majority of the ornate rectangular frames are from TK Maxx, the basic rectangular white ones are from Poundland, a few are from charity shops, the hoops from my local craft shop and the others from Perrywood Garden Centre. And I made the russian doll :)
You can buy the embroidered quotes from my Folksy shop, Wishcatcher Crafts (along with a load of other pretty, girly things) and I hope to soon bring out a range of products featuring the embroidery hoops, as I think they're lovely :) so watch this space!

Some More Crafty Bits....

Day 2 of food and craft for me and my little sister Sophie.

I've posted the food, now for the craft :)

Firstly, my pom making skills have vastly improved :) 

Me and Soph went with mum to a craft shop in the village and mum took pity on my poor unemployed self and bought me some tissue paper! Haha 89p for a packet of 10 sheets and I got 5 different coloured packets. (I clearly didn't take advantage of her willingness to spend money on me, but then again she did buy me petrol last week, which is the most expensive thing ever when you're jobless, so I'm very grateful to her for that!)

Anyway, I digress. So, poms. 

I think this corner of my room looks much better now. All full size poms, this time with ribbon holding them up, so they look more complete. (Although I'm not allowed to use anything other than blu tak on my walls (or in this case pink tak!) so it doesn't look so great at the top, but nothing I can really do about that)
My desk is right below the window so I'm sitting here looking at them, so pretty! I also added another white pom to the other side with the cranes, but I don't have a photo of that.

These blue ones were for Sophie's room, which has a duck egg blue colour scheme.

I absolutely love, love, love bunting.
I made this miniature bunting with some scraps of material I had. So cute!

I've completely run out of anywhere to put more bunting though, so I had to put it round the top of my wardrobe (there's already bunting running across the inside) but I think it's small enough to not be overpowering. In fact I'm considering making another chain so it can reach all the way to the floor.

That shadow on the bottom right is really weird and I have no idea what it's from :S 

I can take no credit for this, this is all my sister's doing. She could really do well as a crafter if she wasn't so set on working with horses (though she's only 13 so there's plenty of time for me to persuade her otherwise!)
She's making all her friend's christmas presents this year, and she's making them either a dreamcatcher or a little garland with their names on. She made me a dreamcatcher a couple of months ago, which is hanging up in my car, but it wasn't a cute little heart like these so I'm trying to convince her to make me one too!

She's definitely talented and creative, making each one personal to each of her friend :)

The downside to all this crafting fun; the absolute mess it leaves in my room!
The floor was my doing, the bed Sophie's.
We also made just as much mess of the kitchen table when we ran out of room to put anything down in there! Oops.

Another thing me and Sophie have been getting into is nail art.
I don't have any fancy tools or anything, so we've been trying to be creative with just what we have. Not bad for a first try right?!

So that was today's fun. I feel like I typed a lot in this post :S

We were also discussing maybe trying to sell some of this stuff, mainly the dreamcatchers, miniature bunting and heart bunting from my earlier post (so stuff we haven't copied from some tutorial somewhere but came up with ourselves) but we're not sure if there would be any interest in any of it. Any thoughts?