Lovely Lovely London

So the weekend just gone we took Millie to London for the first time. We were visiting our older sister and we've had the best time.... EVER! I thought London would be really stressful with a baba, nope, she was a treasure and I can't wait to take her back.

We tried to travel light (this is a downright lie, we drove so we took everything including the highchair, we'd have looked ridiculous on a train!) so I didn't take my proper camera. Therefore I took lots of photos on the trusty iPhone.

I thought I'd share some of the photos from the Natural History Museum. I've used my favourite app to collage them, A Beautiful Mess, it's a great post photo app, really easy to use and the blog that Emma and Elsie write is what inspired Hatty and I to start blogging too... (www.abeautifulmess.com).
 

 

This was the first time I'd been to this museum and I was overwhelmed. Not with the exhibitions, although they were great, but with the building. WOW! It's like a cathedral. Everywhere you look is amazing detail, architecture and design, it's incredible.

 

 

 

 

I could have spent days there even if there was nothing inside. We did however also look round the exhibitions and of course did some dino spotting...

 

 

I love visiting new places and if you have suggestions of museums, galleries or local hidden gems that you love to visit, let me know so I can try them out too!

 

Emily x



Hatty's Home Tour: Kitchen

One thing you will come to know about us is we love to design our homes. We like to do this in as much of a thrifty and DIY way as possible. I love spending Sunday mornings scouring the car boots sales and the afternoons in the bric-a-brac section of the charity shops. Most of the thing in my house are second hand with a few things here and there from IKEA, because come on, who doesn’t love a bit of IKEA?!

My other more recent obsession it with orange, you will notice a lot of orange as a take you through the various rooms. It is such a bright and cheerful colour but warm too.

I wanted the house to be bright, light but also cosy, as the months of winter are long here in Old Brighty.

I started by painting everything brilliant white, walls, ceilings, (floors where possible) doors, and main pieces of furniture.  I got the high eye browed look from a lot of people when I said I was doing this, people said it would feel cold and plain, but I think it does the opposite, it gave me a blank canvas to work.

The kitchen was and plain MDF fitted kitchen, a light tan colour, the floor a horrible, tatty lino and the whole house was magnolia. So I painted the walls white and all the cupboard doors. I also lined the backs of the cupboards with Julie Dodsworth wrapping paper which some may think was a little unnecessary but I love the pop of colour you get when you open the cupboards. I also changed the door knobs which a set of mix matched knobs from ebay.

We cook a lots so we splurged on huge white cooker (in a dream world this would be a Rangemaster or an Aga). I also have lots of spices and wanted them to be on show and easily accessible. I searched for random spice racks at car boots and painted them orange for another pop of colour.

In the future I would like to replace the backsplash with white brick tiles with a dark grey grout (see below), and either white or wooden worktops, what do you think?

Image source: athousandlaughingstarfish.blogspot.com 

DIY: Upcycled Ceiling Fan Light

We moved into our house about 18 months ago and although the house was lovely, it wasn't my taste and I pretty much wanted to change every room. We didn't (and still don't) have a huge decorating budget, so where we could we've used what was there to our advantage.

In our bedroom was a ceiling fan, wooden and brass and not to my taste at all. Light fittings can be expensive so I thought I'd have a go at upcycling what was there and I love the result. (Plus it was a huge bonus having a fan in the bedroom in the heat of last summer, whilst heavily pregnant!)

I stupidly forgot to take 'before' photos, but it was similar to these...

I removed the blades and the brackets holding the blades to the centre disc. I then painted the centre disc without removing it from the ceiling, this way I didn't have to get involved in scary electrics. I used white egg shell and it took a couple of coats.

I then spray painted the brackets white - preferably do this outside or somewhere with really good ventilation. It took about 4 coats to get a good finish. With spray paint, it's better to do lots of thin coats than drown it on the first go.

For the blades - I began by painting them white with eggshell paint. I did a couple of coats and didn't worry too much about the side that would face the ceiling. I made a rough template by drawing around the end of the blade so I could follow this shape down. Using a pencil I marked out the stripes using the template... I did this by eye so they aren't perfect. I have no patience for measuring, which sometimes fails me, but on this occasion you can't tell. I painted the grey stripes using a painters paintbrush and a tester pot of emulsion.

I think the end result is really striking and has turned something dated into something really cool...

And here it is in situ and a little peek at our bedroom...

 

More photos of the house coming soon!

Emily x

To travel is...

Some of you may not know but I love to travel. In recent years I have settled down and have stopped leaving the country for months at time. Although I want this blog to be about the present and future travelling was such a huge part of my life that I wish to share just a few snaps of places I've been. Unfortunately I was not always as into photography as I am now and I know I must of missed thousands of amazing photo opportunities, but I try to have no regrets, so here are a few that made the cut and give a little insight into my travels.

We left the UK on the 9^th Jan 2011 for India; we travelled for two weeks on a guided tour from Delhi to Nepal. This trip was one of my most amazing travelling experiences, India is so completely different from anywhere I have ever been before and a real eye opener, some good experiences and some bad but all very much unforgettable.

After India we headed to South East Asia and took three months to travel around Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia. I loved Thailand especially and would defiantly go back, Koh Lanta and Pai being my two favourite spots.

From Asia we flew over to new Zealand where we planned to live, work, and snowboard as well as travel but I’ll leave that for another time...

Spring Sunshine....

It is true that the sun does not always shine brightly in Yorkshire. And often when it does, it's still very cold. So we decided to go looking for sunshine on a morning out at the Spa Gardens. We looked for everything sunny. Millie enjoyed pretending to be a daffodil (she thought it was hilarious) and we had tea and cake in the Sun Parlour Café, which was even sunny on the inside!

This is a great photography challenge... pick a colour and photograph all sorts of things, no matter how uninteresting they may seem (the couple sitting at the table by the yellow children's chairs thought I was pretty weird I think). As a collage they look great together though...

 

The yellow bike is homage to the fact that the Tour de France will soon be coming through Ripon. We've spotted many a middle aged man in Lycra who probably shouldn't be (on a bike or wearing Lycra - yeeeessh!)

 

The Spa Gardens also had a fabulous exhibition of Alice in Wonderland chainsaw sculptures. Lewis Carroll was said to have spent time in Ripon and was inspired to write the story of Alice falling down the rabbit hole after seeing sink holes here.

Perhaps we'll go on a hunt for Alice inspiration soon...

Challenge yourself to take photographs of a certain colour... or maybe the whole rainbow

Emily x

  

House Plant Shopping

Let’s talk plants, more specifically house plants. So, I am defiantly not the most green fingered of people, in fact a have only just got into plants and I mostly blame pinterest for this recent addiction of turning my house into a greenhouse. Mainly due to dreamy pins such as this:

and this:

I looked up ‘hard to kill’ house plants and found that plants such as spider plants, rubber plants, cacti, and ferns are not only wholly retro looking (perfect) but also great for clearing air pollution.

Here are a few snaps of my first plant shopping expedition, I took trusty Mum for advice, this just seemed like one of those things ‘Mums’ should know about.

So now I've bought the plants I'm looking out for good planters / plant pots and lots of plant DIYs such as these macramé plant hangers:

...and chalk painting terracotta plant pots like this:

So watch out for more blog posts to come on plants...

Oh I do like to be beside the seaside...

Seen as its was the hottest day we've had of the year so far, plus the first day off Mike and I have had together for two months, it only seemed appropriate to head to the coast. Whitley Bay being the usual coastal town of choice we thought we would break from the habit and make our way to Sunny Scarborough

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Despite a slight wrong turn (by that I mean we drove for 30 minutes in the wrong direction and had to drive 30 minutes back, which is amazing because the road from Ripon to Scarborough is pretty much straight!) we arrived by lunchtime.

We had a little wander around to get our bearings and found it to be just what you would expect from a English coastal town on a sunny day, and I don’t mean that in a bad way. There were lots of arcades and tat (I love tat) and cockles (I love cockles), hey, it’s the seaside! What’s the seaside without a stick of rock and a magnet?!

Here are a few of our (one day) holiday snaps

Savoury Muffins

Millie is now nearly 8 months old and she absolutely loves food. So I’m always on the hunt for baby safe recipes, especially finger foods, as she loves to feed herself and it leaves me free to eat my own lunch.

(Nb. For interested parents reading this, I have done a mix of purees and baby led weaning with Millie. She’s pretty independent and likes to feed herself but I also like to know she has actually eaten something. Generally she feeds herself breakfast and lunch and I spoon her tea – I’ll do some future blogs on good batch cooking ideas, although I’m by no means an expert.)

I thought savoury muffins would be a great lunch, easy for at home and on the go. I tried a recipe from, “Yummy Discoveries, The Baby-Led Weaning Recipe Book” but they ended up like pancakes. Millie still likes them, but muffins they are not. Then I came across a Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall recipe online (http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/jun/05/savoury-muffin-recipes-fearnley-whittingstall) and adapted it slightly so it’s OK for babies. Luckily they are still actually delicious and I have had a couple myself, they are great as a bread alternative with soup.

Basically I cut out the salt and ‘bits’ so my ingredients were:

200g plain flour
40g jumbo oats
2 tsp baking powder
½ tsp bicarbonate of soda
8 large basil leaves, shredded
60g parmesan, coarsely grated
2 eggs
250g whole milk yoghurt (I used Yeo Valley Organic)
4 tbsps olive or rapeseed oil (I used olive)
250g courgettes, coarsely grated

Method:

1)      Pre heat oven to 200 degrees/gas mark 6

2)      Combine the flour, oats, baking powder, bicarb, basil and parmesan in a large bowl

3)      In a seperate bowl whisk together the eggs, yogurt and oil

4)      Pour the wet mixture into the dry and combine with a spatula (try not to mix too much!)

5)      Then add the grated courgettes

6)      I then took Hugh’s advice and used an ice cream scoop and put two scoops in each muffin pot. I used my trusty silicone muffin tray and cooked two batches – it made 10 muffins overall

 

7)      Pop in the oven for about 20 mins - They are ready when a knife or toothpick or similar goes in and comes out clean!

 

I kept some in airtight containers for the next couple of days and froze the rest. I’ll be experimenting with different recipes (I’m thinking of a breakfast one for adults with black pudding, yum!) – I’ll let you know how I get on.

Happy baking!

Em x

Photography Day!

After decades (or so it feels) we are finally posting our first blog!

This week we had a photography lesson with Sarah Loveland, a Christmas present from our Mum.  This blog will be very photo orientated and so thought we'd better start with the basics... good photos!

It was fantastic and we’d highly recommend it. We love to take photos but all the techy speak and the one million buttons on our cameras are a bit daunting and we tended to always stick to auto settings. Sarah tempted us from our safety zone without baffling us with science and we hope that some of the hints and tips she gave us will make their way to the photos on this blog.

Sarah came to us which meant we could practice with her in our own homes (it helps that we live three doors from each other). It meant we could tell her what we wanted to be better at and she helped us through it.

These photos are not styled or really thought out it was more to get us used to using our specific cameras and getting us off the automatic setting.

We wanted to be able to take photos of our homes, we had some fun with depth of field and reflections.

Hatty is a huge foodie and loves to cook so she wanted to take better photos of her concoctions. We went to her house and had a practice in her dining room, playing with light and aperture. For some reason we practiced food photos with a cactus, mmmm!

 

Of course, it is also important for us to be able to take good photos of each other and our families. Here are our favourites that we took of each other and Millie.

Finally we had a go at some ‘action’ shots, which are not brilliant but we had a lot of fun taking them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now we just need to do lots of practicing and experimenting to see what works for us... we’ll be sharing our progress on the blog. And if you’d like a 1-2-1 lesson with Sarah or to try one of her workshops or photography walks then check out her website www.sarahloveland.com