Tuesday 10 April 2012

And the winner is.....

Natasha De Vil !!!!


I used a Random Number Generator, but for some reason it wouldn't let me copy it onto here, I do apologise. 


So please contact me via the email here so I can send you your voucher and you can buy those swing trousers!!




Thanks for all your lovely comments and entries into the competition, sorry if you didn't win, I never win either ;o)


Now I'm wondering what my giveaway will be when I get to 500, that would be quite the milestone. 


I hope you all had a lovely Easter weekend. 







Sunday 8 April 2012

Shopping & Sewing

It's Easter weekend as you all know and it's such a joy to have a few days off to just do whatever you please without trying to cram it all in isn't it?

It's only Sunday so I intend to spend the rest of today and tomorrow sewing and watching movies, bliss huh?

Yesterday we had our monthly visit to Farnham Maltings Monthly Market. I always find something and one lady was having a retirement sale, she was selling fabric & linens. Most of the things I wasn't interested in at all, but she had some plain fabric which I snatched up to make some day to day blouses from they only cost between £1-£2 per piece! They're in the wash so I can't take pictures and it's all fairly plain anyway.

I also bought some nice buttons and a belt buckle from her. Great for my stash, you can never have too many buttons!!


As you know I've been swimming a lot recently and one of my problems is what to do with my wet swimsuit. I always forget to bring a carrier bag to pop it into, so inevitably end up wrapping it in a towel which then has to be washed as it stinks of chlorine.

So I woke up this morning and thought, I'm going to make me a wet swimsuit bag!! I had the oilcloth in my stash anyway and I also had some waterproof lining in my stash - I know weird stuff to have in a stash!

I've never sewed with oilcloth before it's quite hard going as it doesn't feed through the sewing maching very easily, but I'm pretty pleased with the end product, cute and functional!!



I have enough in my stash to make a gym/swim bag actually, so when I feel ready to sew with oilcloth again, I'll be doing that.

Meantime I need some blouses desperately so I'm going to dig out some blouse patterns and see what I fancy whipping up.

Don't forget to enter my giveaway here to win a £50 Heyday Voucher, it closes Midnight BST Monday 9th April.

I do hope you're all having a lovely Easter Sunday, I'm off to sew and then watch some Harry Potter later!

Friday 6 April 2012

It's Giveaway Time!!

Well it's all very exciting I woke up this morning to discover my little blog has reached 400 official followers, I know I have a lot of lurkers as I often get comments on Twitter and FB!

Anyway I think this calls for a giveaway.

I've been planning this for a couple of weeks when I knew that a new milestone was coming up, it's very exciting, I'm offering a £50 voucher to spend at Heyday!

Heyday have some great new items which have just come in, adding to their already fabulous selection, so what would you choose if you win? I know what my particular favourites are at the moment, in fact I wish I could enter!!

I cannot tell you quite how much I love this new gab jacket, it has lurex thread running through it, just my thing, I absolutely will be buying one of these, just stunning!

Gab Jacket - Evening Sparkle 

I really love this new Mary Dress in Leopard, the Mary Dresses are such a complimentary style for all shapes and I do love a bit of animal print!!

Mary Dress in Leopard
So what are the rules so that you can enter to win the voucher?

  • You need to be following the blog
  • If you tweet or share on Facebook about the competition you get an extra entry but you need to tell me you've done so in the comment below. 
  • You need to comment below telling me what you would buy from Heyday, or what you would put the voucher towards
  • That's it all fairly easy!
The competition runs until Midnight BST Monday 9th April. I'll try to announce the winner on Tuesday 10th April, depending on time constraints, please bear with me if it's a day or 2 late!

Ok I can't think of anything more to add, apart from to thank you all for the lovely comments on my post yesterday, yes ok I will share more old photos!!


Thursday 5 April 2012

A trip down memory lane....

I know from previous posts that the readers of this blog LOVE old pictures, I always get such a response from posts like this, so when I was looking through some pictures the other day for something in particular I scanned a few in for your enjoyment!

I thought I'd give you a bit of insight into what life was like being in a band and on the road. It was a long time ago, it was fun but sometimes the long hours on the road in the van with a bunch of blokes just all got a bit much, but mostly it was fun!

I love this one of me and Paul


On the road on our first ever trip abroad many many many years ago


Our second trip abroad to the rather glamorous location of Nice, however sharing a room with 6 other blokes wasn't so glam!

When you travel with a band most of your life is spend in the van, it's like another member of the band!



You do get to visit some lovely locations though, that is definitely one of the upsides!



You do spend a lot of time just passing the time though, one of my favourites was table football, bet you didn't see that coming!!


Backstage is for downtime and getting out of sweaty clothes after a show, I do love this shot, just shows how hard the guys worked that night and how hot it was!


I really love this shot, getting ready before the curtains open, people don't often see this. I also love that dress, is was an apricot silk organza but was so delicate it just starting falling to pieces :o(


And last but not least an onstage shot, this was one of my favourite dresses ever, it came to a sticky end when I tore it on the drum kit, how sad is that. This was the point I started to have dresses custom made for onstage as wrecking vintage ones saddened me so much!


I do hope you enjoyed my trip down memory lane!

Tuesday 3 April 2012

Planning Summer sewing

The weather was so gorgeous last week all I could think about was my Summer wardrobe. Of course now it's all changed but I can still think ahead!!

I purchased 3 different patterns last week 2 adding something new to my wardrobe, one not for me but maybe in the future, however I could not pass it up.

First up is this cute Marian Martin blouse pattern, I LOVE these patterns, they are my favourite patterns for blouses, in fact I have several of their blouse patterns. I really love all these, but the one that sold it to me was the middle one, I just love those tie shoulders!


And a really neat addition is the cutting from the paper that the original owner placed in the pattern, she's written the date on too, July 21, 1954, how cool is that?


Next up looks like a rather dreary old lady pattern, but when I saw the shape of it I thought yes I know what I would like to do with that!


I see this worn casually, not tucked in,  over peddle pushers or jeans, with the 3/4 sleeve, can you see what I mean? It's also in a bigger bust size which is great for me!!

I have to say though I LOVE the back of this pattern, there are such fabulous nuggets of information like ' The price of the material is usually a safe indicator of it's worth' love it, so true as well, I never think you have to go crazy, but if you buy really cheap even today, it rarely lasts the distance.  See if you can find any other gems....


And last but certainly not least this beauty!


I once had this exact bikini made by for me by a friend many moons ago (and many lbs ago too!). It was so complimentary and I've been looking for the pattern ever since. Obviously I won't be making it for me at the moment, but it could be a future project, either for me or as part of a project moving onwards eeek!!!

Do you like my finds? Do you have any plans for sewing for Summer?

PS I swam a whole mile this morning, go me!!

Monday 2 April 2012

California dreamin......

This time of year always reminds of California, why? Well when we had more cash we used to always be preparing for a trip to California at this time of year. We always tried to coincide it with a couple of anniversaries we celebrate one on the 27th April and our wedding anniversary on 1st May. So usually at this time of year I'd be preparing my holiday wardrobe! I miss travelling a lot but more than anything I miss Pasadena CA, our favourite place on earth.

I know I've mentioned it before but we would live there if the opportunity arose. We went once for 3 months, rented a short let apartment, and although we couldn't work, we lived a normal life to a degree as we had to do the laundry, shopping and cleaning, we LOVED it and we would certainly like to do that again one day.

So what do we like about Pasadena CA?

One of our favourite places is Fairoaks Pharmacy, it's an old fashioned soda fountain on old Route 66 with a pharmacy attached, it also has a great little gift shop full of vintage and retro goodies. The food is delicious too!!

Source

The Pasadena Rose Bowl Flea Market, this is just so overwhelming! It's the biggest flea market I've ever been to stacked high with vintage clothes, furniture, jewellery, you name it, it's here, you could spend a whole day looking around, it is PURE heaven!


Palm trees, there are huge gigantic palm trees everywhere in Pasadena, Palm Trees make me smile!!


We love Pasadena so much we have vintage postcards in our living room of the city, as a reminder of where we always want to be!


This is a picture of our pool in the apartment building we stayed in whilst we were there for those 3 months! Yes the sky was this clear and blue nearly every day *sigh*



The outdoors lifestyle, something we just don't have in the UK, we just love it!


There is soooo much more about Pasadena we love. We'll be back one day, we'll be back!!

Sunday 1 April 2012

A new start!

It's been so stunningly gorgeous here in the UK the last week that I've been all distracted and not blogged at all, shame on me! Still those that live in the UK know that you just have to take advantage of it whilst it's there, after all that could have been our Summer people ha ha!

Why a new start? Well as you know I've been making some decisions about going forward in life, what I need to work on, both personally and work wise, and just stepping back and thinking. One of my new starts is I'm back at the gym and swimming, and I've started weight watchers! Yep scary huh?

If you're a regular on the blog you'll know I rarely do outfit posts, just cos I really don't like how I look right now. So things are changing. I feel great about it, the meds are keeping the knee pain at bay so I'm ok to exercise now and the weight loss will also help with my knee.

I have a small group of cheerleaders helping me along and I feel good. I've already lost a few pounds, several stone to go.....

Meantime I've been looking at gorgeous clothes that I already own knowing it will take time and effort to get back into them, but feeling very determined to do so.

One of my most favourite gowns, just stunning on!


This is one of my favourite dresses of all time, great colour and plenty of bling!



And a picture of me in it many years ago, I believe I may have had a drink or two....


Ah I love this Hawaiian dress, still a firm favourite! Sorry for bad picture it was taken in the hallway at Viva Las Vegas, many moons ago!


Now this is a poor picture again but this is a gorgeous and rather rare printed woman's gabardine jacket, it's just stunning. However it needs some work to restore it to it's former glory, the cuffs are frayed and I'm waiting until it fits again to work out quite what to do about it.


Remember these trousers I finished only a few weeks ago? Well they're now a little loose YAY me!!


I won't bang on about this journey, it's going to be a long journey and could get very boring for the reader, but hopefully after a couple of months you may start seeing more outfit posts from me!
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