Kitting Out My Imaginary House!

Ever have days when your surroundings royally piss you off?

I’m having one of those days.

My house is still desperately under furnished and it’s coming up for a year since I moved in. The first 3 months in that house were spent drinking every penny with my wonderful cousin. As I mentioned in my new year’s resolutions I want to make my house a home but attempting to do this on a shoe string budget is proving futile and a little soul-destroying.

To depress myself even more I have spent the past few hours trawling through Etsy and looking at all the wonderful furniture to be found. The room stressing me the most is my bedroom so if I had mad money this is how I’d deck it out:

Very much monotone but I’d use splashes of colour with accessories to brighten the place up a bit.

It’s rather eclectic but I’d love a “boudoir” like this!

The Fun Side Of Fashion

“In difficult times fashion is always outrageous.”
Elsa Schiaparelli

Fashion. Trends. Fads. Style.

The ever-changing world of fashion is fast paced to say the least. Accelerated, energetic and cut-throat the ever competitive side of fashion is ruthless. Designers strive to have hit collections season after season along with Resort collections and diffusion lines. Expanding businesses with more and more products, having celebrity endorsements. Bloggers aiming higher and higher, many collaborating with designers and launching their own products, scoring tickets to all the big name fashion shows. Comments, followers, stats – it’s all about the numbers.

But what happens when all that seriousness, that formalness gets too much? We seem to forget that fashion should be fun.

Designers use inspiration from the past all the time. Newest collections from New York Fashion Week have seen nods to the fun-filled fashions of the 60s. As wells as brights, prints and motifs.

Betsey Johnson, L.A.M.B, Jeremy Scott and Milly are just a few of the designers upping the fun factor in fashion this season.

L.A.M.B

Betsey Johnson

Milly

Jeremy Scott

Norma Kamali

Whilst I can NEVER see myself wearing head-to-toe Bart Simpson clothes am pretty sure the celebrities below would certainly entertain the notion!

Marina Diamandis

Not afraid of wacky prints or zany accessories, Marina dresses for herself and is part of the “cool crew”

Nicki Minaj

The wigs, booty and clothes all make up the mega star that is Nicki Minaj. Love her or hate her, the bold clothing sure makes an impact.

Jessie J

Girl of the moment Jessie J has the voice and the style and isn’t afraid to take risks.

Rihanna

The most provocative of this lot RiRi isn’t afraid to flaunt her body in daring shapes and clashing textures.

Katy Perry

Less costumey than usual the former Mrs Brand still stands out from the crowd in super brights. I especially love the Charlotte Olympia “Keyboard” shoes!

Whilst my own personal style is a thousand times more demure than the images I’ve shown I am grateful for the fun side of fashion.

What do you think of wacky designer creations?

My Own Kind Of Vintage

Clothing 20 years old or older is generally classed as vintage. I, however, have one particular dress in my wardrobe I term as “vintage”. I’ve owned said dress for almost a decade now which in wardrobe years is about 50 years old. I think at one point I knew about 8 people who owned the same dress.

Me in THAT dress

First time I ever wore this was for my engagement party (yeah cos that relationship totally worked out right enough!). This was taken early 2005 around the time that EVERYONE seemed to be buying Jane Norman products. FYI I can’t get over how slim I was here, I remember thinking I looked like a total heifer in this then. Touch of body dismorphia perhaps??

I'm such a classy burd

Oh My Word! If I felt fat in the dress before whatever possessed me to wear it then when I’m about 4 stone heavier?! This was 2006 (I think) and in my heyday of being a bar manager hence the mega fatness and muchos alcohol!

The third and final time I wore this was February last year for an ex friend’s birthday. I deliberated for ages over wearing the dress or not but considering it had sat in the back of my closet for a fair few years I decided to give it an airing and am SO pleased I did. I finally felt confident wearing the dress and knew that there wasn’t any chance of anybody else sporting the same ensemble in the club!

So the dress may make another appearance in a few years time but one things for sure I WILL be keeping a hold of this until I can properly claim it as vintage.

Do you have any items that get wheeled out every now and again??

Hair Envy

Throughout the years I have experimented with many different hair colours – some nice, some not so nice. It all started in my last year of primary school, during the October break my mum said I could colour my hair with one of the Wella colour Mousses (remember them???) I chose a damson colour to cover the mousey brown inherited from my dad. The colour was only supposed to last a few washes, unfortunately it turned my hair bright purple and wouldn’t wash out! My bizarre hair colour was frowned upon at school and only after a few months did it die down to a dodgy pink shade and I was able to cover it with a more natural shade. This wasn’t my only hair disaster, I’ve also had dyed blonde hair that turned a rather disturbing khaki shade after swimming too much one summer, bottle blonde hair and chlorine = green hair. And no, tomato ketchup does NOT tone it down. Some hair cuts have also left me in tears – layers too short to do anything with, during a particularly tomboyish phase I also had a horrendously short do, paired with the Adidas tracksuit bottoms and trainers needless to say I did actually look like a boy. Not my finest moment it has to be said.

My mum has gazillions of photos documenting my dodgy barnet over the years but I don’t have a scanner so can’t get the photos onto my laptop. Am sure there is an easy way but as I’ve previously mentioned am not very good when it comes to technical stuffs. As a small child I was also blessed with the most awful (and this most be said in a broad Weedgie accent) coo’s lick.

My hair didn’t stay this colour for very long, it quickly turned to the afore-mentioned mousey brown. I also inherited fine, almost baby like hair from my Dad’s side of the family unlike my sister who was ridiculously thick tresses – COW! My (almost) life long battle against fine, thinning hair has led me to try a ludicrous amount of hair plumping products.

My current favourite is the Fat Hair range.

I use the shampoo, conditioner, thickening spray, root lifter and hair spray. More often that not I also use dry shampoo for a bit more body as well and I still feel my hair isn’t big enough.

As for hair colour mines is what can only be described as Bronde but I’m a bit bored with this and fancy a change.

Excuse the dippit facial expression!

The person who gives me the most hair envy is Alice Levine, the TV presenter who can usually be seen on Big Brothers Bits On The Side.

I think the shade of her hair is lovely and being a fellow pale skinned ghost  person I can see myself rocking this look.

It looks so shiny!

In the past my hair has leant toward the ginger side but never a shade as luscious as this. The only thing worrying me is that Alice is thin and edgy. I am NOT. Do I really have the balls  guts to sport this vibrant ginger hue??? Or should I wait until I lose a fair amount of lbs??? If I receive enough encouragement I may just take the plunge!

Girl Crush #3

I previously mentioned my Girl Crushes on Rachel Bilson and Audrey Hepburn here and here yet those attachments are eclipsed by my HUGE girl crush on Holly Willoughby (or if you’re a fan of Celebrity Juice, Holly Willoughbooby!)

I’m going to be honest. I envy her figure. I envy her clothes. I envy her hair. I envy her bubbly personality. Basically I’m a green eyed monster! I should hate Holly for being so pretty and nice and stylish. But I can’t. I JUST WANT TO BE HER!

Holly is one of those lucky souls that have progressed from kiddies TV to bonafide nation’s sweetheart with her presenting on This Morning, formerly Dancing On Ice  and soon to be The Voice.

Style wise she and best pal Fearne Cotton design collections for Very.

Whilst Fearne’s collection receives alot of media coverage over the “coolness” of it I sometimes feel Holly’s collection is wrongly overlooked. Be it a tea dress or a more structured cocktail dress I think Holly’s collection is suitable for most women.

Another reason I love her so much is her decision to wear strapless dresses whilst having such big boobs! There was many complaints when Holly wore a “revealing” dress on Dancing on Ice she however appeared to shrug off the controversy by saying (on her reaction to her Dancing on Ice dress incident) “I’m proud of my curves, I’m not going to wear dresses up to my neck – that’s just not me. I have boobs and hips and I dress to accommodate them – that’s not going to change.”

Yup Holly’s dresses may show off cleavage but they never look tarty due to the lengths of the dresses. She embraces her curves instead of trying to hide them.

As for her hair, I am at a loss as to how to achieve Holly’s volume and level of shine on dyed hair.

Pretty much ALL the men I know admit to fancying Holly – I think it’s the mixture of girl next door innocence against the fun loving and often naughty Holly on Celebrity Juice. She is a self-confessed good girl often saying “The only time I ever got in trouble was when I threw my shoe across the classroom. Hardly sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.”

There must be an outrageous number of men who fancy Holly, when I was looking through Google for images one of the most commonly searched phrases was “Holly Willoughby Celebrity Juice School Uniform” NICE!

Below are some of my fave photos of Holly:

Channelling Brigette Bardot

Fun and flirty

With the Silver Fox himself Phillip Schofield

Embracing her curves with another lovely dress

Even "dressed down" she still looks put together

Poured into a red show stopper for the red carpet

Another day, another tea dress

Effortlessly stylish

taking the piss with Ant and Dec after a drunken night at the NTAs

And here is one random photo of me where apparently I look like Holly!

In the pub with my lovely cousin Ashley

My hair has never been that big before and I just can’t recreate it again 😦

I think my cleavage mixed with a pencil skirt and heels were the only reasons for me being nicknamed Willoughbooby all night!