North West Bloggers Meetup

I'm not the most sociable person in the world. Innate shyness and an inability to make good small talk, combined with a longing to spend my spare time curled up with a good book, means that I probably turn down more invitations than I should. The fear creeps in and I make my excuses.

Sunday saw me putting on my brave smile though. Can't stay in the house all my life!  I trotted off to the Hard Days Night hotel with Laura for the North West Bloggers meetup.  I'd had a mild panic midweek when I realised it was mostly beauty bloggers attending. I can't do makeup, argh! It's bad enough when I'm surrounded by uber-stylish, slim, 20-something bloggers without them all being gorgeous and perfectly made up as well.

Oh well. Get over yourself, Alex, thought I, and off I went.

Made quite the entrance too - I promptly fell down the stairs into the room it was being held in. Thankfully there weren't too many people there at that point to see me making a tit of myself.

Anyway, onto the photos! We had one room set aside for sitting, scoffing and gossiping and another one housing stalls set up by various brands. Loads of chances to chat to local businesses and stores, get samples and generally have a good time.

Fashion Zoo are a Liverpool based jewellery company with a heavy animal/tribal theme going on. They'd brought along tons of gorgeous things. That seaside bracelet totally reminded me of Rosie.

The lovely ladies from Liverpool Lush were there too. I've decided that as soon as the house buying process is over and done with, I'm treating myself to one of their spa treatments. I went to the opening of the Liverpool spa last year and it's utterly gorgeous inside. Definitely time to try it out.

This was half of the raffle prizes! After much eager waiting (I am a complete sucker for a raffle and turn into a 5 year old waiting for Christmas) I won these:



Awesome!

T'was clearly the day for curly hair as the lovely Rebekah Treherne gave me wavy princess locks

Hannah and Frances did such a fantastic job organising it and rounding up so many great stalls and people to attend. We got a fab tshirt each from Original Attire and a massive goody bag full of all sorts of treats. I shall have much fun putting this lovely lot to good use!

I'm very glad I made myself go. Hope the next one is just as great!

December Frolics

This month is always hectic. Big events at work, lots of shopping to be done, parties, ridiculous amounts of baking, meeting up with friends... It's rare that I have any free time during the majority of December. I'm permanently knackered and skint and my body and bank balance don't thank me for it!

But I finished work on 14th December and all of my Christmas stuff is DONE. I can now breathe a huge sigh of relief and enjoy myself until 7th January when I go back to work.  It all starts today as I have a quick jaunt down to London planned to watch the showjumping at Olympia.  Exciting!

December hasn't been all rushing around madly though.  I did manage to squeeze in some fun, relaxing stuff as well.

I was invited along to a preview of the new Lush spa last week.  Now I'm not the sort of person who tends to indulge much in makeup and beauty related stuff, but I am a big fan of Lush so I had a whale of a time there!  The shop is huge compared to the last one and the shelves are positively groaning with delicious goodies.  You may be shocked to hear that I headed straight for the massive pile of Snow Fairy scented stuff (top right in the above pic).  Yes, I know it's pink and I am notorious for loathing the colour, but I adore the smell.  It's in my top 5 smells list (FYI, the others are freshly cut grass, blown out matches, bread and JPG for men) so I just shut my eyes and wallow in deliciousness.  

The spa is gorgeous too - sort of Alice in Wonderland meets English country cottage.  Just a brief wander around it to look at some of the treatments left me feeling utterly blissed out so I can definitely see myself venturing back there in the New Year for an early 2013 treat.  Which treatment to pick though?  Decisions, decisions...

I also ventured into the unknown for the third time this year and booked some tickets to an evening of secret cinema with Reel Unknown.  The previous two films were Con Air (complete with Vegas style set-up in the Kazimier) and The Goonies (which was in the Williamson Tunnels and was fricking awesome).  We knew this wouldn't be Christmas related, but the only clue we had was to meet in the graveyard of Liverpool Cathedral one cold December evening.

Can you guess what the film was?

Young Frankenstein of course!  Oh it was brilliant - I've never seen it before and I laughed my (odd) socks off.  Could they have picked a more perfect place than the Medical Institute to show it in?  I don't think so!

Then last weekend it was time for tea:

Afternoon tea at The London Carriage Works to be precise.  We had a mini Liverpool tweet-up and jolly nice it was too!  I always feel terribly ladylike when finger sandwiches and mini cake are involved.  Weirdly, whenever I go anywhere with bloggers and other internet folk (who you'd expect to be more forgiving of my habit of taking photos of my clothes), I never remember to take any outfit photos.  So there are no pics of me looking terribly ladylike, but I wore my River Island London print frock and StylistClick sparkly shoes.  It would have been a pair of my finest Irregular Choice heels but Liverpool is a city built on a whopping big hill and I can't hike in heels!

I'll save them for Christmas Day when I'll be doing nothing more tiring than tottering from house to car and back again.

 

Hello from Herefordshire

So then, the wi-fi works!

In typical form, I've managed to balance things out by killing some form of technology and MELTED the tv remote control by not realising it was on top of the fire. I am exceedingly dim sometimes.

It's quite dead.

The cottage is lovely and I'm having a fab time so far - shall do general holiday photos at some point this week if you won't be bored by them, but for today I shall just do a quick outfit post. I really must get more comfortable with someone taking my picture as I feel really self conscious still and so all the photos taken of me today look awful and really unflattering! Ho hum. Back to the tripod it is.

Jumper - H&M
Shorts - H by Henry Holland at Debenhams
Tights - M&S I think. They're a lot darker and greener than they're showing up in these pics.
Boots - Evans
Coat - Tu
Ribbon - from a Lush giftset
Socks - Dorothy Perkins
Nails - Barry M in Racing Green (v. difficult to photograph properly!)

I quickly replaced the ribbon with a knitted headband/earwarmer thingy as it was so flipping cold today but no pics of that. There will probably be some soon though because I rather love it. Not as much as I love these shorts though. Aren't they great? 25% off as well - gotta love random sale weeks.

This Week

I have been:

Photographing:

Autumn at work. We have some good trees.

Lacking:

Inspiration. I think all the housework I've been doing today has knackered me out and so I can't think of anything particularly interesting to talk about. It's been a quiet week. It'll probably be a quiet month as I've got bugger all money left.

Luxuriating:

In a very hot, very bubbly bath. I used a Bathos bubble bar from Lush for the first time - MMMMM! It smells like a big bath full of Parma Violets. Again I say MMMMMMMMM. Don't know why it took me so long to get round to trying it but I'll definitely be buying more.

Buying:

Vintage and second hand goodies. I had a bit of a charity shop spree yesterday which turned up a couple of nice tops, some Kurt Geiger green suede heels, a super cute handbag, tons of books and a very fun vintage green fur hat. I'll try and get some photos of the ever growing hat collection up soon.

Making:

Melting Moments biscuits, stewed apple, apple and blackcurrant crumble and blackcurrant and vanilla jam, all in the space of a few hours this afternoon. I miss my old kitchen. This one is a) tiny and b) has no dishwasher, so cooking more than one thing at a time is a tad tricky. I cope, but I really hate doing the washing up.

The jam was my first ever attempt. I don't know if it's set properly but if not, hey ho, I have lots of tasty blackcurranty goop!

Drinking:

Red wine. For the first time ever. I am gobsmacked with myself. I have always loathed red wine - it smells and tastes like socks - but I had a sip of some with dinner on Tuesday and it was rather nice! I'm sure my taste buds are late developers because I've only developed a liking for coffee, curry, melon and a host of other things over the past year, having previously loathed them.

Wanting:

A more interesting header/title thing for the blog. Any ideas? I don't have the technological wizardry to do it myself but I don't know where to go to get it done!