Sunday Stationery: The Geffrye Museum Notebook

September 20, 2015

I had a fab afternoon last week visiting The Geffrye Museum in Shoreditch. It's a museum of the home, set in some old Almshouses and is free (although donations are very much welcomed), and of course there's a shop which I didn't leave empty-handed.

I left with a notebook (no surprises there), some wrapping paper and some seeds. Today I'm just going to share the notebook as I've plans for the wrapping paper (and not the usual sort of plans) so I'll most likely share that another time. There wasn't much choice of notebooks in the shop, but it didn't matter as this one caught my eye straight away, and the man in the shop assured me they were stocking up on notebooks very soon. That's good news for my future visits, but I'm still not sure how they knew I was coming!

And in case you're wondering the cover is an adaptation of a letter written by Charles Lamb to William Wordsworth about London in 1801. Who knew that Hipsters were around then?!

Inside the front cover there's a lovely Robert Macfarlane quote too:

I've no idea yet what I'll use this for, but I couldn't leave it on the shelf and I'm sure when the time comes I'll find a use that's just perfect for it.

The future's bright...

September 16, 2015

Well on the High Street it is at least! On a recent trip to Oxford Street I was struck by how colourful the displays were, so I thought today I'd share what I found. I saw all of these and more on visits to John Lewis, Debenhams, BHS and House of Fraser.

So if we buy what's in the shops now, and let's face it there's a high chance we will, then we'll have colour in our bedrooms, bathrooms, living rooms and kitchens. So let's get started...

Well I'm a sucker for nice crockery (remember these bowls at West Elm) and it was a window display with these items which drew me back into the shop and looking for the homeware department.

CLASSIC AND COLOURFUL JOSEPH JOSEPH (DEBENHAMS)

Another exciting discovery was the West Elm concession at John Lewis. Im still in love with their bowls!

Right moving on - and away from the bowls - the cushions in Debenhams were definitely striking.

AND THERE'S FLORAL CUSHIONS TOO (DEBENHAMS)

Not everything needs to be full on colour for it to be colourful. This photo frame caught my eye and is a lovely way to introduce colour into a room.

While crisp, white bedlinen is a treat (except for when you need to iron it!) there's a lot of colourful bedlinen available too. I was pleased to see there's still quite a bit of yellow around, that's especially useful for me as we have pops of yellow in our bedroom.

CALMING BUT STILL COLOURFUL BEDLINEN IN HOUSE OF FRASER

And then there were the towels! I fell in love with these bobble-edged ones in House of Fraser and did well to leave them on the shelf. The hedgehogs and the ducks were cute and a fun way to introduce some character in your bathrooms. And something I'd not noticed before was towels coordinating with bedding, so you can get the look right through into your en-suite. Clever.

So as you can see, my browse around the department stores in Oxford Street was quite a colourful experience. I love colour - in our house and wearing it - but do you? How do you "do" colour?

Decorating our spare bedroom

September 7, 2015

Today me, my blog and our spare bedroom have been featured on Wayfair, the online home store, in their Inspiration section - see How to Adhere Wall Stickers Like a Pro. Below is an image of the finished room, to see how I stuck the wall art, pop over to Wayfair.

It was quite a job getting the room looking so good. Not only had it become our dumping ground for just about everything, there was also a box we hadn't unpacked since we moved in nearly thirteen years ago (whoops!) and we'd had a bit of a leak above the window. Yes the leak was on our middle floor, but it's all fixed now thankfully - but it did leave us with an unsightly corner.

Those curtains too had to go - they were hung when we moved in, and had come from my bedroom in my last house. You'll remember we got a lovely wooden venetian blind to replace them. Much, much smarter!

Even with the wallpaper repaired there was still a way to go to get the whole room looking fabulous, and we also had to tackle the floor. We decided to go for sanded floorboards, so it was out with the carpet, the hardboard and the gripper rods.

Thankfully the floorboards weren't too bad and I spent a few hours pulling out all the tacks before the professional sanders came in. When they left, this is what our floor looked like:

What an improvement.

With the floor done and dried MOH's job was to add beading between the floor and the gap in the skirting board - a tricky cutting exercise with so many corners in one room. It took him most of one Saturday morning to complete - and in that time I'd painted three walls and done the seemingly never-ending job of cutting in, in Farrow & Ball's Skimming Stone. It's a colour we have throughout the house. This works for us as it brings continuity as you move through our rooms and it also means we have less tins of paint to store in the shed!

The fourth wall - and the largest by far - is painted in Farrow & Ball's Dove Grey, which we've also used in our bedroom on three walls (in there we have wallpaper on the largest wall). With the painting completed it was time for the bit I was looking forward to, adding the wall stickers.

Here they are with MOH's 40th anniversary Naim posters which I had framed by Bernie at Bromley Picture Framing. He did a great job - at short notice too - and I'm really pleased with them and I'd go there again, especially for large pictures. We had planned to use IKEA frames and bought the Stromsby variety. However they aren't truly A1 size and so there was an uneven border of white showing around the edges, and then there was the small matter of not being able to get them to hang on the wall!

Seriously, one evening we spent more time than I ever thought possible trying to hang a very large picture on a single screw, which we discovered barely fitted the hole in the fitting. Neither of us were convinced it was safe, even if we managed to get all three up on the wall - and it was a big if. And after trying to hang one picture for at least two hours, we gave up!

With the now custom-framed pictures hung (much more easily too), now it was time to unbox and start assembling the maze of cardboard boxes we'd stuffed into my Clio on the Friday night. We bought four Kallax units, a couple of drawer inserts and twelve door units. Let me tell you that's a lot of assembling. Each unit has twelve storage compartments - we joined a 4x2 and a 2x2 together, more on that another day though. One unit is for MOH's records, our DVDs and some tools. The other one has been dedicated to shoes - mostly mine and it's glorious!

So that's our spare bedroom done - and another room ticked off the list. What dou you think?

Thank you to Wayfair who provided the wall art stickers for this project.