There is another alcove in my bedroom that I didn’t show in the last post, it’s quite a difficult space as it doesn’t get a lot of natural light and it’s an awkward shape due to it being where the chimney breast runs up the house. 
After a lot of thought, I fell in love with the idea of a glass display cabinet, ideally full of rows of my shoes. Yes, shoes again. I have a lot of them. To be fair I’ve been collecting them for years and years it’s very rare these days that I spend any money on myself, but the joy of my liking retro style heals is they never go out of fashion (as they are rarely in fashion!).
I spent a lot of time hunting on eBay for the perfect piece at the right price. The big problem is obviously no-one is willing to deliver glass so I got very excited when I found a cabinet on a charity auction site with postage costs and at a very reasonable price. It was in a bit of a state so was going to be a gamble, but the low price meant it wouldn’t be disastrous if it didn’t work out.
It was delivered by Parcelforce (I’m not kidding!) wrapped in a lot of bubble wrap and cardboard but survived intact. The wrapping was genius, if I remember correctly.
The first job was to try and revive the very scratched woodwork. For this, I went old school, and rubbed it down with an oil and vinegar mix and wow! 
What a difference it made. It was an almost miraculous recovery. It was so long ago that I’m not fully sure, but I think I then gave it two coats of Danish Oil before hunting down some old lock escutcheons on eBay. They were very cheap and once they arrived, I liked the bakelite one best.
As the door stayed shut nicely, I just added a modern brass rabbit knob instead of trying to find a replacement key for the lock….just look at how pretty the wood looks in comparison to the top eBay sale photos.
There is a matching rabbit used as a knob on the eaves cover just to the left. I used up all my leftover brass furniture handles and knobs on the eaves doors, so it’s quite nice as they are mostly mismatched, which I like; it was coincidence these two ended up near each other.
I love this piece of furniture. It cost very little and works really well to fill the dark space as it allows light to pass through, is quite shallow in depth and, most importantly, I get to put pretty things on display!
The light on top came from Graham and Green and the gorgeous candle which smells amazing as well as being beautiful was a Christmas present (it’s by Fornasetti).
These were the original pictures in the space, but I’d promised myself that one treat when the room was complete would be buying new images as pay off for all the hard work (these ones have gone somewhere else – the wedding photo was my 18th birthday gift from my Mum, she found it in an antique shop and knew I’d like it, the tapestry was stitched by my Gran and used to be in my bedroom when I was a kid).
The two framed photos are from King and McGaw and I absolutely LOVE them. They are both vintage Vogue photos.
Vogue Early September 1960 by Don Honeyman
and Felt and velvet mandarin hat by John French. They would really be nicer as larger images but I had to stay smaller to fit in the space.
The final thing to go on the wall is a little frame with some of my vintage brooches on.
It’s just a cheap photo frame from Sainsbury’s taken apart and a chunk of cork board covered with white linen put back in where the glass should be. It allows me to display my brooches but also take them down easily to wear and the sparkle from the stones is really nice in the darkened corner.
It was very exciting at the time (nearly 14 years ago, I guess).
All the plaster in the house was sprayed white at the very beginning and that’s pretty much where it ended in the bedroom. Even the blind was one I’d removed from the old house and adjusted to fit. The room didn’t even get skirting boards.
Come 4 years ago and it was very much on my hit list to be done. I’ve become quite handy with basic woodwork so I put on all the skirting, sanded and oiled the remaining flooring (most had been done but there were a few patches still to do) and then moved onto the painting.
One of the joys of being single is I get to do whatever I like to the house. I love that. After 10 years of all white, I was getting a bit bored and was in the mood for some colour. I took a lead from this fabulous vintage barkcloth fabric which I had in my stash (and hoped to use for the blind) and a notion that I really wanted to introduce some green to the room.
After lots of tester tins, I went with 
The floating bookshelves are Umbra Concealed Floating Bookshelves (you can buy them on Amazon) and the watercolour is a vintage one by Yorkshire artist Angus Rands. I liked the colours in the painting (it’s one I inherited from Mum) and it’s propped there so I can use the colours as inspiration. I often do that, base a rooms colours on some fabric, or a painting.
The problem was, I struggled with the new paint colour. It felt slightly cold (this was back in March 2017, I think, – oh yes, that’s how long it can take me to finish and blog a project!) and when I’d been searching for fabric for blinds, I’d fallen in love with this amazing original barkcloth on Etsy. It nearly killed me to buy a second tin of paint and re-paint the wall, partly due to the cost of Farrow & Ball paint, but I changed it to Breakfast Room Green and ordered the new fabric and then took that as my colour lead for the rest of the room. I am dying to use Arsenic somewhere in the house, but it didn’t go with the new fabric, sadly.
The other walls were painted in Slipper Satin, which I love and use a lot.
I had the added complication of needing to make a blind for the internal window that overlooks the studio (this was me creating the paper pattern). There wasn’t enough of the lovely floral fabric to use it on its own
so I paired it with some dark green linen and some amazing Robert Kaufman Essex Yarn dyed linen/cotton which has a gold metallic thread running through it in Dusty Rose.
The blind is attached with gold hoops stitched on with gold thread and hooked over gold capped mirror screws. It’s hard to explain but it folds back on itself and then gets hooked up onto the wall to ‘open’ the blind. If I’m honest, I rarely open it as the room gets quite good light from the windows and velux and I’m too lazy, even though it only takes a moment.
The gold thread in the top pink fabric makes it hard to photograph as it reflects the camera flash and yes, that is some of my extensive Chie Mihara shoe collection. I refer to it as my ‘shoe shop’ corner, complete with a seat ready for trying on – ha ha.
I’ve owned the chest of drawers for years – it’s from 
The dressing table is also quite old now and originally came from 
The little vintage vanity case is another of my favourite things and I keep my makeup in it as well as the ‘B’ case which came from 
I especially like having some sentimental pieces around and this one was Mum’s – she gave it to me when I was a teenager and I’ve had it ever since, I believe it’s from the 1960s.
The hold up was the inside. I had bought some shot orange linen to sew a lining (similar to the original) but it just never got done and the idea didn’t sit well with me either. The original fabric lining was quite stained and dirty and the neat side of my brain couldn’t cope with the same thing happening again, I wanted something more practical inside and that could be wiped and cleaned, if needed.
So on Friday, I bought a sheet of MDF and it got a permanent box lining instead. Today it’ll get varnished and then I’m attaching two brass chains on either side of the lid to stop it flopping back and toppling the whole thing over when opened.
Last week I took a day out to sew curtains and cushions for the living room. The curtains were desperately needed as it’s getting cold and the big square bay window can allow a lot of heat loss if not covered by a decent curtain.
The curtains on this window are hung by an Ikea Dignitet wire. I don’t really do traditional curtains, in fact, I generally don’t do curtains at all as I prefer minimalist, modern coverings so most of the windows in this house have roman blinds (always hung outside the frame to allow for maximum light), but on this window blinds aren’t practical. The wire used to hang at the back meaning the small side windows allowed a lot of heat to escape plus it’s a bit creepy in the winter, I always imagine someone is out there looking in at me as I sit on the sofa in my pj’s, as you do. I moved the wire to the front and changed the curtain to one large one hung in a way that it folds neatly and mostly fits in the small side recess when closed, so you can barely see the curtain at all and it allows as much light in as possible. It’s hung oddly with the folds on the far side of the wire so that the curtain hooks show, which is probably not to everyone’s taste but I quite like this.
I shrank the original curtains after washing them recently. Muppet. I’ve reused the fabric as it was expensive linen but I needed the new curtains to be washable and stiffer in order to get the neat folds I was after when closed, so I backed the entire thing in extra wide ‘Opera’ fabric from 
It’s not something I’d normally chose but I really like the idea of it as a surprise backing fabric and it matched the pale green linen from the front perfectly, plus should I ever want to go floral I can reverse the curtains and have the birds and flowers on show instead of the plain linen. The curtain also has a thermal lining sewn into it and some regular curtain tape (purely for stiffness) sandwiched between the layers to aid the firm folds at the top. All the fabrics have been pre-washed and the curtain hooks are removable so it can be taken down and washed in the machine at home. 
I had some linen left over and it was a perfect opportunity to get some tapestry cushions made up that have been sitting on the spare bed for months. Everything has come from stock except the two pheasant tapestries, which I bought on eBay for pennies. I had planned to add piping cord but abandoned that idea knowing that these cushions will be heavily used and cotton piping tends to wear away quite quickly on the corners.
In my mind they do look a bit ‘unfinished’ without some piping…or a twisted cord would have been nice too.
But they are done and it’s another thing to tick off the list and that makes me VERY happy.
I did finish some of the new aprons, but there wasn’t a chance to photograph them (red is very difficult in good light, but in winter, almost impossible). I’m happy to have the ‘reject’ one to keep and wear on Sunday (I always keep the one I am least happy with), the rest will be for next year now.
I bought an extremely cheap box of tat from Ebay…
to use with some tree rejects (the things that weren’t strung etc) to make a wreath. It’s not to everyone’s taste, but I love it. It only took about 20 mins to make and then a painful hour to fix to the door!
It’s on just in time for the weather to turn nasty, as the remains of Storm Barbara head our way. The door has a small overhead porch so I’m hoping it survives alright, but as pretty much everything on there is plastic, it should be OK.
So that’s it. I’m quite excited about not leaving the house for a few days and for the first time in forever, we genuinely don’t have anything planned for almost a week (we do have guests, here and there, but I have a stocked freezer and cupboards, ready). I’m thankful we’re all healthy and happy and together for Christmas so I hope for the same for everyone I know.
I’ve spent a lot of time recently trying to work out the best way for me to balance making a living, with looking after the boys. My oldest finally has his official diagnosis and Charlie will (hopefully) be getting his in the coming year. Having children ‘on the spectrum’ means I am quite restricted in the hours I can work, especially with being a single parent, and having gone through a quite difficult transition into Secondary with Felix it just demonstrates to me how dependant the boys will be during certain periods of their lives. So, it really does have to be working from home (for the moment, anyway) as that offers the flexibility I need, and it has to be sewing, as I’ve already invested so much time into establishing a ‘business’, plus it’s the only thing I really know how to do. The difficulty is it’s getting increasingly hard to compete with commercially made items, especially now that ‘vintage’ (sorry, there are lots of quotation marks today…..always makes me thing of Ross in Friends and I cringe slightly that I use them so often!) is so mainstream, and handmade (resisted the urge to stick quotation marks there) is also so fashionable. I’m not complaining, I love how much lovely stuff you can buy these days, I just need to take some time out properly in January and plan how best to present my work to either differentiate it from commercially made things, or to compete on price. I see beautiful pieces of work on a daily basis where I think about the price versus how much I would have to charge for something similar in order to make it scale. Tricky, but doable. I have faith in me 🙂
Every year, I buy the boys some form of decoration critter that goes in their stocking, usually it comes from Anthropologie (See the top photo for this year’s bits and pieces) but as I was reading Facebook this morning, the cutest thing popped up in my targeted adverts from 
Clearly I’ve shopped there before, for their link to appear in my social media, but I haven’t had a look for ages and I got sucked into a good browse this morning.
I love the 
They also have Mimi Kirchner owls!!! 
Sooooo cute.
I was a bit gutted to miss out on a Doug the Pug from the ASPCA Animal ornaments (F would have LOVED one of those!)
but I did get a couple of Brimley Cats, which the boys will be very exited about (in case you don’t have internet crazy kids, this collection is inspired by famous internet pets).
On the US site you can even get tea towels!
If the above don’t work for you, what about some Fair Trade handmade ornaments?
or (and this is probably more my kind of thing, at the moment) some sequin clip-on birds?
They have quite a few pretty Christmas bits, much at half price right now, so it is worth popping over for a look.
We’ve gone for retro tack again this year, our favourite thing being the foil flowers Mum took off some crackers in the 1980’s. You don’t have to try hard to work out who I get my hoarding tendencies from, I mean, who keeps tacky cracker decorations for 30 years!!
My plan for today is to wrap gifts, write cards, and it was to photograph a new Christmas apron for the shop, but the light is so bad I don’t think that’s going to be possible…
I might even find time to watch Elf and eat a mince pie 🙂
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