When I Grow Up - Page 25

Weekly wardrobe – gothic circus look for a beach walk!

October 10, 2016

Rain chose a walk on the beach as her family activity for her birthday, so yesterday afternoon we drove over to Brean and parked up past all the tacky arcades to as near to the cliff as you can get. It’s a handy carpark with a National Trust shop, cafe, and (most importantly) loos. Sunny and hot one minute and cloudy with a chilly wind the next, it was difficult to know what to wear. I opted for layers with a steampunk circusy vibe; and why not? ….

Anti-reflective coating on your glasses – is it worth it?

October 9, 2016

Whenever I’m recording a You Tube video in my work-room, all I seem to do is spin round in circles trying not to have massive white rectangles on my glasses. They somehow even manage to appear with my back to the window! When Chris is taking photos for my Weekly Wardrobe posts, we’ve more-or-less given up with glasses, so I stumble about blind for the sake of not having glaring white blobs in the middle of my face. (Hashtag blogger problems.) I am so short-sighted, I cannot see a thing without them, and I hate that feeling so much. So finally, even though there was nothing particularly wrong with my glasses, I decided to splash out and buy a new pair with anti-reflective coating….

The Story Behind the Photographs – Morvah mine

October 8, 2016

Chris and I took two days off work before the bank holiday weekend, and drove the camper-van down to Cornwall. We had three nights and four days away altogether and in that time we saw Jeremy Loops play at Perranporth; met up with family; took several photos for Oshun and for the blog (such as the one at the top of this page); relaxed a bit, and even found time to take some photos just for the fun of it. The great thing about wild camping is that you can wake up right next to the most wonderful wild places, including this ruined tin mine. One of my favourite photos from the day I chose to have blown up and printed onto canvas for our living room. It was a beautiful morning and the pathway towards the sea was just magical….

Game of Thrones costume ideas

October 7, 2016

Winter is coming and that means halloween is creeping up on us, so I thought I’d start you off with ideas for costumes from the famous HBO series, Game of Thrones. I’ll be honest, I didn’t get into it straight away – I think we gave up on it after a few episodes because I thought it was too violent and gratuitous and already characters I liked got killed. Then I knew I was going to meet Maisie Williams (Arya Stark) as she was going to judge the competition where we made items of clothing from old books. So I had to watch it, just in case it came up in conversation! So we ploughed through, and it wasn’t until the third series when I actually started enjoying it. Then I really got into it! Here are some ideas from Etsy….

My Cornwall photo on canvas! Printed by Printerpix

October 6, 2016

Chris and I are very fussy about art for our walls, and we don’t always have the same taste. We compromise by never ending up getting anything! However, when the opportunity came up to have one of my photographs blown up and printed onto canvas, I was really excited by it. I have a massive 60% discount code at Printerpix for you at the end of this post. I chose a picture I took during our recent campervan trip to Cornwall. The old disused mine is easy to find on the North coast road near Morvah. It’s a popular spot for rock-climbers and hundreds passed us on the footpath towards the cliffs, lugging their gear with them. It was fairly early in the morning when we went photo-spotting, and I turned away from the sea and looked back at this ruined mine building….

Burlesque Wonderland – Alice through the Martini glass at The Fleece in Bristol

October 5, 2016

From blackberries yesterday to burlesque today! And why not? Rain didn’t really know what to do to celebrate her twenty-first birthday. She had originally planned a day of wand-making (yes really) with her two best friends, followed by films and a sleepover. Then Jude spotted this event in Bristol just a couple of days beforehand and we all decided that we’d quite like to go. So the wand-making stopped early for everyone to change into their Alice in Wonderland Costumes….

Blackberry picking

October 4, 2016

At this time of year, throughout our childhood, my sister and I would go to Nanny Up-the-road’s house (Or Nanna Sharland to my cousins) and then we would venture off to Woodland’s Walk with washed empty ice-cream tubs ready to fill with autumn fruit. I used to look forward to it so much. Proof that you don’t need expensive toys and gadgets to have fun – just nature and family time. This is a gentle post about memories and blackberries….

Weekly Wardrobe – embracing autumn colours

October 3, 2016

I do feel summer colours particularly suit me and I’m reluctant to let them go. In the spirit of #IwillwearwhatIlike, I will probably continue to wear pale blue and blush pink regardless of the season, but now we’re into October, I thought I would stop denying summer is over and pick something a little more autumnal. This is just a casual outfit I wore at the weekend for no particular occasion. We had crappy weather on Saturday, but wasn’t Sunday beautiful? These autumn style photos were taken in a nearby village just as it was getting cooler….

Welcome to Blogtober!

October 2, 2016

What is Blogtober?I have set myself a blogging challenge to upload a post every single day in October. I noticed several people doing Vlogtober on You Tube, but as I already have Vlogmas planned for December, I decided to stick to writing and photographs for this month. Yes, I know I’m starting a day late. That’s because Friday’s post was delayed by a day, so that’s pushed everything up a bit. This is also quite a brief one because this weekend has been all about my eldest daughter’s twenty-first birthday, which has kept me rather busy. So, the reasons I’m doing Blogtober are to see if I can keep it up because maybe I’ll try writing shorter posts, but add them daily even after October if it goes down well. Also, I love blogging, but it is encroaching on my Oshun business time because I am a slow writer. At the moment I spend about an hour and half writing a post; an hour taking, editing and adding photos and half an hour to three-quarters adding links into the it. My goal in daily blogging is to make the process much faster without compromising on the quality. I’m hoping the daily practice will help a lot, but if it doesn’t, at the end of the month I’ll probably go back to three times a week. We’ll just have to see how it goes! The last reason is that I have a notebook where I write all my ideas for blog posts, and I have so many, at the rate I’ve previously been going, I’ll never catch up with all of them, so I’m looking forward to writing all the things I’ve had in my head for a while. Wish me luck!

Monthly Memoir – September

October 1, 2016

September is mainly about birthdays in my family – particularly this year as it’s a special one. Jude was eighteen on the twelfth, and Rain is twenty-one tomorrow. So we took a trip over to Kent to celebrate with each of their grandparents; aunts, uncles, and cousins etc and of course eat birthday cake! Although it seems like we travel there quite often, I still miss them all since we moved, so I like a good reason to see them again. A week later, Jude celebrated with friends by having an afternoon tea party in the garden. They all really enjoyed themselves and the food, games and weather were all a success. I’ll be writing a blog post next week about the whole thing, if you’d like to come back and have a look. There are also some pretty pictures on my Instagram!….

What to do with your leftover rhubarb

September 28, 2016

Rhubarb is virtually indestructible and is about the only fruit or vegetable I can rely on in the garden! My rhubarb was inherited from previous owners of our old house and moved with us to this one, so is at least seventeen years old. It just keeps on and on growing from March until the first hard frost. If you’re the same and still have some left and are bored of rhubarb crumble and thinking, What shall I do with my rhubarb? then here’s a couple of suggestions: Rhubarb streusels and rhubarb muffins. Both these recipes have been adapted from magazines, and you’ll need plenty of paper cupcake cases. The streusels especially, are a hit in the family…..

How to style a simple grey t-shirt

September 26, 2016

You don’t need me to tell you how to style a grey t-shirt – it goes with everything: jeans or any style trousers; any length, colour or design of skirt; or under dungarees or pinafore dresses. However, I do want to suggest that’s it’s a much more flexible than the plain white t-shirt. White doesn’t really suit me anyway – I have fair skin with a cool tone, so white tends to wash me out, whereas grey basically somehow makes me look a bit better! Here’s a couple of outfits with the same t-shirt. They were taken a couple of months apart from each other, and when I picked out the purple skirt, I had totally forgotten the previous outfit also had purple bottoms. Never mind, second to dusky blush pink, purple is my next favourite colour to wear with grey…..

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