My Living Room Tour

Hey chaps, long time no see!

Way back in November 2013 I showed you what our Living Room was like when we first moved in. Here's a link back to that old post. It was looking pretty sad and bare, and since then I have been working hard to re-decorate.  It has taken me ages to find everything that would fit, but I think I'm pretty much there now, so today I've decided to finally do a living room tour! 

As I mentioned in my first post, I decided to go for a yellow and grey colour scheme. Eventually I also decided to give it a bit of a botanical/natural history museum feel, which you might notice a little bit more in the close up photos.

The first things we bought were the sofa, the armchair and the rug. The sofa came from Next, and the armchair and rug were both from Ikea.

The cushions came from H&M Home, except for the little grey ones which I made myself from off-cuts from the curtains (They were crazy long!)

I hunted for quite a while to find an old botanical encyclopaedia which had pretty pictures in it that I could hang, and in the end we found one at an antique shop which I mentioned in this post. I chose Kiko frames to hang them in as I liked the simplistic look.

My absolute favourite buy was my hexagon shelves, which I had specially made and shipped from the US. I think they make a really nice focal piece in the room, and I was really pleased with the way they turned out.  The birds on display are actually made of lego, you can find the kit here . I like the fact that they have their latin names on little plaques below them, I feel like it fits with the museum theme pretty well!

So just to compare, this is what the lounge looked like before...

...and here it is after!  A great improvement I'm sure you will agree!  The curtains were also from Ikea. I think having less heavy curtains has made a huge difference to the room. And I think painting the walls grey makes it look a little bit more homely.

I made the butterfly chart hanging above the fireplace using a pretty poster, you can find my No-Saw DIY here.

I also made a little trio of pictures using another botanical book that my friends Mum bought for me. I couldn't decide which pictures to use as there were quite a few good ones, but the great thing about the Kiko frames is that I can swap them whenever I want!

I bought these agate slices when I was on holiday in Majorca, I thought they would make great coasters to go on the table, and they are so pretty! I might buy some more of these just to put on display on the shelves.

I re-painted this little side table to match my colour scheme, since it used to be blue. The phone is another of my favourite things in the room, it was given to us as a wedding gift!

This magazine rack started out life as a yarn holder which came free with a knitting magazine. I decided I wanted to re-cover it to match the room, and I found some awesome honeycomb fabric from Zazzle which I thought would work really well. The amount of choices of fabric patterns and fabric types on Zazzle is insane, so it took me ages to decide.  You can also design your own fabric, which I would love to try at some point!

All I did to make it was to unpick the old fabric from the frame, then I used this as a template, and tried to make an exact copy of it with my honeycomb fabric.  The only tricky bit was attaching it securely back onto the frame. In the end I had to do this by hand which was a little bit difficult  as the canvas fabric which I ordered is quite thick, but I got there in the end and I think it looks fab!

I also used the same fabric to make a little table cloth for the coffee table which you can see in the earlier pictures. I think that they really match my hexagon shelves beautifully .  

Another good buy was my Oliver Bonas shelves/drawers. I was pining after them for a long time since they were pretty expensive, but in the end I decided I had to have them! They definitely help bring the room together. 

This TV cabinet, as well as the coffee table were both things that I found at the dump. They cost me £5 each and were both a little worse for wear when I found them. But after a good sanding down and a few coats of grey paint they looked good as new! This cabinet is actually the perfect size and we can fit the X-Box in the little cubby hole and all of our games inside.

There are still a couple of things I would like to do before I will feel the whole room is complete, but I am much happier with it now that I feel there is some sort of decor going on, rather than random furniture thrown into a room.

Laura xXx

Disclaimer - The honeycomb fabric was gifted to me by Zazzle. I was really pleased with the quality of the fabric and service and I would recommend to those that are looking to add a unique touch to their decor.

Read More

My Wedding Album - Made using Blurb Book Smart

Hi Guys, I want to share something with you today that I have been working on for aaages!

Since our wedding I have been planning to make a wedding album, but it seemed such a huge undertaking as we had over 600 photos, and I just didn't know where to start! In the end I managed to get a book made and delivered just before our 1 year anniversary, but it took a whole lot of effort! I thought I'd share my experience making the book with you, incase you are thinking of making your own wedding album, or any other album for that matter!

I wasn't sure what company to get the book printed with, so I did some research online and found that people were pleased with their Blurb books, and it looked the best option for what I wanted. I have to say, I was a little worried when I saw their page templates for the first time. The wedding album templates included a lot of text for some reason, and the boxes meant for pictures seemed to be strangely off centre and not in the dimensions I wanted. Fortunately Blub has a function whereby you can build your own template, and once I figured this out I was more than happy! I built the book using a program you can download from their website called 'Book Smart'.

I pretty much designed each page dependant upon the photos I had to go on it, which is one of the reasons it all took so long.  I think I was probably working on the book for about 4 months in total, as it was something I found I had to do a little bit at a time. 

As well as picking which photos were going where, I spent a lot of time making sure the boxes were even as well as the gaps in between and centralising the photos.

Once I had pretty much completed the album I found that to get the best quality the photos should be resized to the same dimensions as the box they were going into. Obviously this was another job that took a really long time, especially since nearly all of my pages were different, but I think it was worthwhile in the end.

The above and below pictures are two of my favourite layouts which I designed. I found it immensely satisfying when the pages finally 'came together', it did take rather a lot of trial and error in most cases!

On the back of the book I chose a picture of our confetti cones, which I think looks rather pretty!

I'd definitely recommend Blurb, and I'd say that the more time you put into it the better it will look! Picking the right photos to go together, and positioning them in a complementary way, as well as knowing when a picture deserves its own page, are all really important in creating a quality product.  I am really pleased with the way that my album turned out.

I chose the 'large square' sized book, as I wanted the pictures to be as big as possible! It has 116 pages in total (probably containing around 300 photos) and I chose one of the most expensive papers, as well as 'image wrap'. Since I had spent so much time on it I didn't mind spending a little bit extra to make it as high quality as possible.

This album would normally have cost me £100, but I managed to get a 30% discount from Voucher Codes. I probably would have ended up spending a few hundred if I had asked the photographers to do it, so I think that is pretty good!

Have you used Blurb or another site to create a photo book? What have your experiences been like?

Laura xXx

Read More

Macmillan Wonderland 'Apres Ski' Party!

This year I decided for my Birthday I was going to throw a party, and after I saw this advert, I knew exactly what the theme would be!...

          

I thought it would be fantastic to raise money whilst also having a jolly good time, and on sunday the day had finally arrived!

I printed off lots of vintage skiing travel posters, as well as the bunting Macmillan had provided. I also created the 'Frosty Ski Slope' cocktail which was basically an amalgamation of what we had left in the cupboard ;) But actually tasted rather nice!

Of course we had to have some gingerbread men too! Which I let the guests decorate themselves.

To raise some extra cash I decided we should have a raffle and sell tickets to all of the guests.  As well as some of my friends and family making donations, I also had some amazing support from some wonderful makers and companies!

We had some lovely Christmas cards donated by claireabellemakes, Jenny Jackson and OhhDeer who also donated 2 cute notebooks.

Claire makes these cute scrabble themed Christmas cards which you can buy in her etsy shop.

You can buy these cards from OhhDeer.com.

These super sweet 'Pigs in blankets' cards can be bought here.

This awesome hat was donated by The Purly Queen. Isn't it wonderful? And perfect for the Apres Ski theme!  You should stop by Cheryl's etsy shop and check out her other lovely hand knitted products!

I decided to group the prizes to make as much money as possible on each ticket, so we had 3 winners and I let them pick a prize from every shelf, meaning that they won 5 prizes each! And here are our winners...

Macmillan also created a downloadable printout to guess how many marshmallows in the hot chocolate, but I changed it to 'snowballs in the jar'. Each person paid 2 pounds to take a guess.

As per usual with our parties, I had to customise the chalkboard in our hallway for the occasion!

We also had a nice backdrop for photos which my Aunt and Cousin originally painted for our wedding, but it came in very handy for this party too!

I had also bought some fake snow. You just add water and it grows, its amazing! We decided to do some slow-mo films with the new iPhone 6 camera, which hopefully I'll put up on the blog at some point too.

We played 'the peg game' where we secretly attached 4 pegs to 4 peoples clothing, then announced that if you found a peg on yourself you had to peg it to someone else without them noticing.  The people with pegs on them at 10:30 had to drink a 'dirty drink'.  I had a brilliant idea to avoid loosing which was to lock myself in the toilet a few minutes before the end. It worked fantastically, except I had made a mistake earlier, which was to peg a 'non drinker'. I had said that anyone not drinking could nominate someone else, and of course I got nominated! Duh!  Anyway, here I am with my fellow peg-ees drinking a rather disgusting drink.

In the end we raised a whopping £350.60! Which I was really pleased with, and I think everyone had a great time too, which was a bonus!

Have you done any fund raising this year? Would you hold an Apres Ski party for charity?

Laura xXx

Read More