The King of Rock and Roll and the King of Heaven

I intended to post yesterday in celebration of the fact that I now have 100 followers, but I left it a day and now I have 101! Thank you so much to all of you for following me.

Without further ado, here is the wonderful Swiss made frock that lovely Curtise gave me. It is a terry towelling  fabric in red white and blue with a zip down the front. It is soft, comfortable and I love it! It takes me straight back to about 1974. Time travel, you can't ask much more of a dress than that can you?

Here it is teamed with the amazing 1970s platforms gorgeous Vix gave me. I regularly put high heels on my list to Santa in about 1974. Didn't get them at the time. It just goes to show, good things come to those who wait...

A few of you asked what I bought on my recent trip to Chesterfield market. Well, the easy answer is fabric! Plenty of it! Can you tell I'm a Textiles graduate?

An amazing alpine tea towel, a wonderful 1970s offcut featuring a rocking horse, the softest yellow floral cotton curtain to be made into something or other and a 1940s tablecloth which went straight outside onto the table up the garden.

The tea towel is entitled Les Chamois. I looked it up and it is a type of goat antelope which lives in the Alps. Perfect. I love it so much.

Such is the voraciousness of the pigeons hereabouts, we have had to cover our crops in netting. I like to think of these strawberry blooms as little brides peeking out from behind their veils.

I inherited an amazing gold and turqoise ring which was stolen years ago. The universe has sent this 50p special from Chesterfield market to replace it. Thanks Cheapskates, I shall wear it often.

The King of Rock and Roll and the King of Heaven. I can't believe I didn't buy these Graceland pounds. What am I going to use when I visit?

Coffee pot from Chesterfield market and matching anenomes in my garden.

That's all folks! xx

Didn't we have a lovely time, the day we went to...

Can you tell where it is yet?

This is what I look like serious. By later on in the day I was grinning so much I developed extra chins and ended up looking a bit like David Walliams when he dresses up as a laydee.

It's the one and only Chesterfield, in Derbyshire, in the East Midlands of England. A place I have driven through many times on the way to other places, but never actually stopped to enjoy. It is famous for the twisted spire on its church.

We were invited by the lovely and lady-like Curtise to come and join her on one of her regular jaunts to the Thursday flea market. We followed in the steps of market goers who have been doing the same thing for over 800 years!

The romantically named Knifesmithgate, a row of beautiful black and white tudor buildings.

If they got anything like the welcome we did, I'm not surprised they kept coming back for more! Every few yards people were calling out greetings and offering compliments. Our Vix was like a celebrity. One woman we encountered is even a fan on her facebook page! I've never known anyone who inspires strangers to make so many spontaneous approaches. It's the combination of looking so amazing and her trademark big smile. We basked in the reflected glory.

Strawberry daiquiri followed by Mojito. Post prandial grins all round.

Over a lunch of cocktails we made a lovely new friend in Annie. She is such a sweet, gentle soul and so easy to talk to. We were asked if we were fashion lecturers, performers at the local theatre, on a historical reenactment, or Jehovah's witnesses. We had such a laugh. Just to clarify, the answer is none of the above.

We got quite excited in the toilets at Wetherspoons. This is the way it works on a bloggy day out: we talk non-stop for a few hours and then realise that we haven't taken any photos, so out come the cameras in all their shapes and sizes and we snap away like seasoned paparazzi.

And then, just when you think it can't get any better, there are the presents! It's like Christmas morning!

A fine woolen scarf with alpine flowers, a 1969 marmite cook book and an amazing pair of original platforms from Vix, to be modelled soon. Travel fridge magnets from Annie.

Photos from a 1964 copy of Woman's Journal, colourful vintage glassware and a wonderful dress from Curtise, to be modelled in a post of its own soon.

Bloggy days out are the very best!

I promise to come round a-visiting you all soon! xx

We're having a heatwave, a tropical heatwave

Over here in Blighty, June has come in with a bang. There is sunshine, there is warmth and there are summer dresses.

Do you remember this one? It's my tablecloth dress. It looked a bit dental technician in white so I dyed it yellow and added a bit of lace down the front. It's simple and cool and the length makes me feel all youthful.

The weekend was very sociable. On Saturday I met up with the girls for a country walk and picnic. This is a typical farm building in this part of the country, with this red brick and these decorative patterns in the brickwork. I wonder if this part of the building was used as a dovecote, with these holes where the doves would fly in and out.

A field of rapeseed, fluorescent yellow against the blue sky. A snake in the grass!

This looks like a normal pair of hands, doesn't it? Well it's not. These, my friends, are the Fingers of Fear. They belong to my younger sister, who came to visit. 

The Fingers of Fear and their work are part of our ritual when we get together along with eyeballing each other's wardrobes and usually a bit of disco dancing. They are permanently cold and are capable of inflicting the most excruciatingly effective massage known to man. Long and thin, they intuitively know where the tightest muscles are. They go straight to them and work their brutal magic. She laughs her head off as I whinge and moan and say 'blimey' and 'oh my word' on repeat. By the time she finishes, I want to sleep like a baby. 

Our latest food obsessions. Rosemary potatoes and roasted tomatoes with garlic and thyme. Here we did them as crostini with olive bread and goat's cheese. Perfect for a summer lunch out in the garden.

I'm linking to Lakota's Ta-Dah Tuesday because of my homemade dress.

Mrs Malaprop has been missing in action

I see I have been missing in action for quite some time. Deary me. Where does the time go?

I have no idea. I can tell you that I have been busy, but I can't necessarily specify how. We have certainly been working hard on the garden, because when I thought to look at my recent photos, they are all of flowers.

We did a pop up Steptoe and Son for a day with the contents of the shed. A couple of pieces came out to be chucked, but most of it went straight back in. Excellent. Guess we'll be doing another one soon.

 I bought this dress a while ago, but when it arrived, it really honked. I stuck it out on the line to air for about a month. It's been hanging around like the protagonist from Don't Look Now at the top of the garden. I think it has now finally been rid of its anti-social tendencies. Now I just need to do a bit of jiggery pokery on the sewing machine and it can be unveiled. It's crimplene. I'm not a mad fan of synthetic fabrics: they have a tendency to make my hair look like this dandelion, but I'm going to give it a whirl.

I thought you might like to view my world-famous cellulite fish. I have a friend who has entertained us for years with her malapropisms. When she gets cold, her teeth clatter, and, for the record, she is electric to meat.

I'm a bit of a vocabulary geek. I love a juicy word, and I love to know the provenance, particularly if it is foreign. Did you know that the word parlor started off as a parley room, which in itself comes from the french 'parler' to talk or speak. Or that the word 'shufti' meaning have a quick look, comes from arabic and was brought into common parlance by soldiers returning from North Africa during WWII?

No? Well, you do now. So endeth the lesson for today.

In other news, I am still awaiting action in my bedroom. The wardrobes, I mean. We'll have less of your sauce. When the man finally turns up, this is what I want it to look like.

This post feels rather as though I am grasping at straws. But good news this way comes. Over the next few days I am going to escape the garden and see Actual Real People, so hopefully there will be something blogworthy to report. I just wanted to say hello...

Lovely link up

I like nothing better than a peek around other people's homes to see how they have decorated them. The perfect opportunity has come my way!

Kylie and Donna are doing a 'Show us a retro/vintage corner of your home' link up.

I'm in! Are you?

Go on, you know you want to...

Sherwood calling!

A posy from the garden.

We live in the city of Nottingham in an area called Sherwood. Here are some characters you might recognise, who lived not far from here. They were left here by the people before us. I need to find somewhere for them to continue their reign. 

This was supper out on the patio on a sunny bank holiday. It's a puff pastry tart topped with leeks from our garden.

In this area, '50p, ducky!' is one of my favourite sentences to hear on a Sunday morning. For non-Notts-natives, it rhymes with cooky and is a term of affection widely used by slightly older people, particularly at the car boot sale which I frequent, which is in the shire rather than the city.

A Noddy eggcup, various brooches, Bulgarian treenware, a cellulite fish, 8 rolls of brightly coloured cotton thread, a German chalet weather house, all prompting that magic phrase.

But the thing that set my heart racing when I saw it was this ballet print. It is from a painting of the ballet Giselle, by an artist called Carlotta Edwards. When I was small, my dream was to be a ballerina. But not just any ballerina, the corps de ballet was not for me, I wanted to be a prima ballerina like my heroine, Dame Margot Fonteyn. This was well worth a bit more. Two British Pounds to you ducky.

I've been making a dress out of an old tablecloth. It's a bit Institution Chic at this stage in the proceedings, and that expression on my face fits the bill, but once it is dyed and a bit of trim added, I am sure (!) that I will look as casually elegant as these ladies on the right. I'm going for the version with sleeves.

Here's someone I have recently come across and admire very much, Jack Munroe of the blog a girl called Jack.

Questions: what local colloquialisms do you have to share? What did you want to be when you were little?

Pick yourself up, dust yourself down, start all over again

If I had to describe my 2013 so far, I would say positive but totally frenzied. And none more so than these last few weeks.

Three weeks ago, for various reasons, I decided to move my Mum from 200 miles away to just up the road from me, so now I have a new playmate close by. That was quite a momentous project. On a lovely sunny day yesterday we went to nearby Wollaton Park for a wander round the lake. They filmed the latest Batman film here in 2011. The 16th century Elizabethan mansion was used as Wayne Manor.

In the meantime our neighbours went away so we have been frantically trying to do some big outside jobs before their return to avoid as much friction as possible. Voila! A massive brown fence. I know you're going to be both fascinated and impressed. How can you help it?

And finally, I got a phone call one day to tell me that the warehouse which housed my entire stock from the greeting card and gift business I ran for seven years from 2004-11 and which I had put on hold whilst I was busy with family stuff, had gone bankrupt. I had just over an hour to go in and sort out all my stock. Needless to say, thousands of pounds worth of stock ended up in the skip and that is the end of the business.

But I have no regrets. It was a good business. I achieved so many ambitions, I exported my product across three continents via my distributors, I supplied the shops I specifically wanted to at the outset such as Selfridges and Paperchase as well as several hundreds of other brilliant galleries, giftshops and department stores across the world, I ran a team of sales agents across the UK, my designs were featured on design blogs and in design publications, I exhibited at trade fairs, had good working relationships with my customers, had lovely fans and most of all I made some great friends. And all of this from a business I started and ran single-handedly from my spare bedroom. So I raised a toast to freckleface and thought of all the good things that have been, and most importantly, got excited about whatever may happen next.

Here are some of my hundreds of designs!