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My Favourite Pictures From 2013 (Part 2)

July

August

September

October

November

December

Hello everyone!

As promised, here's Part 2 of my favourite posts from each month, Part 1 can be found here in case you missed it yesterday.

What are your plans for New Year's eve?  I'm going to a friends birthday party which will be fun, but will require hair rollers, high heels and large dose of glamour - no small task after a week of hibernating in baggy sweaters and eating chocolate like it's going out of fashion!

Tamsyn x

My Favourite Pictures from 2013 (Part 1)

January

February

March

April

May

June

Hello everyone!

Well here we are, standing on the edge of 2014.  On New Year's eve 2012, I made two resolutions.  One was to wear more red lipstick.  You will have to take my word for it that I stuck to that one!  The other was to start blogging.  So I sat down, came to Blogger, and made the beginnings of a pretty blog.  I was so excited, but so worried that I wouldn't find enough to blog about.  What if I ran out of ideas?  I even made a list of potential subjects/items to photograph, a list that I never even looked at after the first week.  (I've since learnt that the more you use your creative side, the more inspired you become.)  I thought I'd give it a go, see how it worked out.  I never imagined that one year later, I would have joined such an inspiring, creative community, become so passionate about my photography, learnt to fiddle with HTML code (well, sort of!), and that the blog would have been featured in two lovely magazines.  For lots of very dull, grown up reasons it's been a tough couple of years, but I feel so proud of how far I've come with this little project - I'm definitely having a punch the air 'YESSSS!' moment!

So, to celebrate the start of a new year and to look back at 2013, here are my favourite photographs from the first six months of the year, I'll post Part 2 tomorrow. 

 Have a lovely Sunday!

Tamsyn x

Vintage Champagne Glasses

Hello everyone, hope you're having a good week!

So as I may have mentioned before, I had a small collection of vintage champagne saucers, collected from car boot fairs over the last year or so.  I loved them, they were so delicate and pretty, and it felt very decadent and Gatsby-like on the one occasion I actually sat with a friend and used them to drink bubbles out of.  Sadly I broke them whilst having a clear out.  Sob.  As my dear mum has always said on such occasions, 'No use crying over spilt milk!'.  A not entirely helpful saying but there we go.  I prefer 'Dry your eyes princess, and go buy some more!', which is indeed, what I did.

These were not the car boot bargain bottom-of-a-cardboard-box in a field type champagne saucers, these were a treat to myself from eBay.  They are actually pretty heavy and very clear cut glass or maybe even crystal, so I will take better care of these ones.  I'm looking forward to making some sort of elegant cocktail over the festive period, and I shall use these for a touch of vintage glamour.  

Bottoms up!

Tamsyn x

Polaroid Style Prints

Hello everyone, I hope you've had a fab week so far!

Printing my own photo's at home has always been a bit hit and miss.  I used to fork out an absolute fortune for Canon inks and Canon paper to go in my yep you've guessed it, Canon printer.  In order to try and be a bit thriftier, I then tried cheaper inks and paper, only to disappointed with the quality and slightly faded colours.

However, since then my style of photography has changed, and the cheaper inks and papers actually give me exactly the results I love - a slightly faded, vintage feel.  My face lit up when I went into the Pound Shop the other day, and discovered that you can buy packs of 50 6 x 4 photo paper for, ahem, £1.  Which quite frankly is a bargain.

I decided to try printing out some of my Instagram pictures, and I discovered that by formatting them to print in the middle of the paper with a border, and then trimming the top off, I had these really rather lovely vintage Polaroid style prints.  Perfect for making a lovely mini photo album or scrapbooking.  Or hanging on a picture washing line, or even gift tags...so many fab possibilities!

Tamsyn x

Welcome September, and Thank You!

Hello everyone, I hope you are having a lovely, lazy Sunday afternoon!

I can't quite believe that September is here and that I've been blogging for a full eight months now.  I just want to say a huge 'Thank You!' to each and every one of you for your support and encouragement.  Please do keep coming back and leaving your lovely comments - I do love hearing from you!  

Some big changes are afoot around these parts, which are actually pretty exciting for the blog - I shall be sharing that with you very soon.  In the meantime, I just wanted to share these shots of this lush hydrangea I bought from my local market with you - soon the petals will be fading to parchment hues, a true sign that Autumn is on its way.

Tamsyn x

Lovely Lollies

Hello everyone, I hope you've had a good week!

I made these lollies the other day with my son, who is five.  A distraction was needed, as the children were squabbling, and I'm starting to run out of ideas for entertainment as we are nearing the end of the summer holidays!  My daughter is less keen on kitchen based activities, but my son, who is a big fan of anything that can be munched upon, is an enthusiastic chef.  I'm not able to give you a coherent recipe as once I plonked the ingredients in front of him, he pretty much put lots of everything in - what I can tell you is that we used strawberry yoghurt, chopped raspberries, coconut milk and a little honey.  The lollies do taste a little tart, so I think we might try and find an actual recipe to use next time!  It was fun to do though, and kept us amused for twenty minutes or so.

I searched quite a few places for lolly moulds before finding these rocket shaped ones in the 99p Store in Norwich - my day was made!  For your 99 pence you get two sets of six moulds, which is pretty amazing.  They also come with brightly coloured sticks, which are fine, but being the fussy so and so that I am, I had a vision.  That vision involved buying traditional wooden lolly sticks, which you can get from Lakeland for a couple of pounds.

The fabric in the background is a gorgeous vintage duvet cover which I got from car boot fair last weekend - I adore the print!  

Have a lovely weekend!

Tamsyn x

My First Guest Post...

 Hello everyone, hope you're having a fab week!

I was lucky enough to be asked by the lovely Stacy at Style My Party to do a guest post over on her blog - my first proper guest post!  Here's a teaser shot, for the full post please do pop over and take a look on the Style My Party blog!

Tamsyn x

Pebbles...

Hello all!

By the time our holiday was finished and it was time to go home, our caravan and awning were filled with buckets and buckets of pebbles. It wasn't just the children that collected them - I can't resist scouring the beach for a perfect, smooth, oval pebble. We put most of them back on the beach, the children painted pictures on some, and we kept a few as souvenirs.  I put them in this jar so every time we see them, we can be reminded of our seaside holiday.

Tamsyn x

A pop of colour - homegrown Dahlias

Hello!

We moved into our house nine years ago, and excited by the prospect of having my first proper garden, I promptly went out and spent a small fortune on every plant I could get my hands on.  The result was a little muddled to say the least and finally I have worked out what grows well with the least effort.  The garden is looking at it's best at the moment, so I shall try and take some snaps to share with you.  

One of the plants I bought, was a peachy coloured Dahlia.  Dahlias were seen as a bit of an unfashionable bloom a few years ago, and it's only recently that they seem to have become trendy again, and I'm seeing them all over Pinterest!   I love cactus and pom pom Dahlias, which are what you can see in the pictures above - -they make me feel nostalgic, as when I was little I remember my grandma always having a brightly coloured bunch in a vase during the summer.

I adore them for so many reasons - the divine colours, the fact that make the best cut flower ever, and you don't need an allotment or huge garden to grow them.  I get mine in tuber form (bit like a bulb) from QD, a cheap and cheerful home garden shop.  The tubers are around £2-£3 each, and it's so much cheaper to buy them like this and plant them in early Autumn rather than buying them already in bloom from garden centres.  Proper bona fide gardeners lift them out of the ground and carefully store them over the winter - I am very lazy and never bothered to do this, so sometimes they come up the next year, and sometimes they get taken by the frost.  

I grow mine in huge pots in my garden, as it's on the small side, though plants will grow much bigger with lots more blooms if they grow in the ground.  Slugs love them, and the slimy little blighters can obliterate a small plant overnight.  As my children are way past the eating everything in sight stage, I have to admit I do put some pellets around the base, and they know not to touch them.  I do move the pots out the way if we have any young children visiting.  Lots of water and a bit of Miracle Gro now and then, and you get the loveliest flowers to plonk in a vase, all the way through o the first frosts-I still had some flowers on one of mine last year at Halloween! 

Tamsyn x

Beach Holiday....

 Hello all!

Many apologies for the picture heavy post, but some of you may know me well enough by now to know that I'm all about the photographs!

We go home the day after tomorrow, and we have had such a lovely time.  We are on a little camp site near Pevensey Bay on the Sussex coast, in my parents caravan.  To sum up our holiday we have done the following (in no particular order!)

Eaten ice cream (lots of)
And fish and chips
Used the beach as our playground
Watched the sun go down
Bickered A LOT (the children)
Collected and painted pebbles
Been on a nature scavenger hunt
Swam in the sea (well, technically!  If two seconds counts!)
Been to A&E (my daughter, for a cut head after falling off a little sea wall!  Glued together, all fine!)
Lived in a caravan, just the children and I, for a week and survived!
Caught the sun
Eaten cockles
Had Pimms and lemonade from a can (wonderful!)
Been to bed late every night

I hope you are all having a wonderful week, I will be back to regular blogging from Friday-I have some more pictures from our holiday that I would like to share with you on my next post!

Tamsyn x

Deconstructed roses...