so very lucky...

Hello lovely friends!  I hope you've had a great Christmas...ours has been very nice...lots of relaxing at home in our PJs watching films and munching delicious treats.  I seem to have been living mainly on brie, mince pies and port!  I have taken a break from the computer and also apparently from my camera - realised earlier I've hardly taken any Christmas photos!  I'm a bad blogger...

But we still have festivities to come...my sister is visiting from London so we are gathering at my Mum's today for Christmas round 2, and are then heading east to Sussex for further fun and games at New Year with much-loved-not-seen-often-enough extended family.

As I have been neglecting my camera I don't have much to show you...but I would just like to share one gift with you which has made me very happy...

This is a detail of my new bedroom curtains!!  I haven't hung them yet because our bedroom needs some work...decluttering, some more shelves, a lick of paint...but when these are hanging at the window I will be beside myself with joy.  They are 60s, Swedish and stunning.  

There are many reasons why I am lucky - some deep and profound to do with love and family, some basic and fundamental to do with having a home and enough to eat...but today I feel lucky for the frivolous-but-important-to-me reason that I have beautiful new curtains.  I hope that you have also received gifts that make you feel lucky, if you share them on your blog let me know so I can pop over and have a peep!

Rachel x

discombobulated....

Hello, I'm back...I've had a funny peculiar couple of weeks, with a case of evil flu which forced me to cancel everything, including R's birthday party, and retreat to bed for a few days...I still feel a bit wiped out.  

Everything else is going well, but having such a big break from blogging has made me feel a bit weird...like there's too much to catch up on, so I don't know where to start!  I feel like if I don't jump back in soon I never will, so here's a little selection of what I've been up to...

gazing lovingly at vintage goodies at our local monthly Vintage and Flea market...

at which I met the lovely Bristol based maker Alice Rose Lewis, whose work I was not at all surprised to discover has been featured on one of my favourite blogs, Kickcan and Conkers.  She was selling a few of her lovely stitched creations, I think I should have bought one for Rufus's birthday, but I couldn't decide which one!  These were some of her early works, she's got some amazing more recent pieces in her Etsy shop.

I've enjoyed R being big enough to want to join in when M is dressing up for parties...

And as my flu thankfully subsided we managed a birthday treat for R, a magical evening in the woods with storytelling and aerial acrobatics...

 

There, I feel much better now!  Thank you for all your lovely comments while I've been quiet, they have all been read and appreciated, and I have still been reading your lovely blogs and leaving the odd comment.  Someone was asking me about blogging the other day, I was feeling a bit flat about not having posted for a while.  As I started to answer her questions I realised again how much I love having this space to share, and how supported I feel by all of you who take the time to pop in and read my ramblings.  It is a special place, this blogland, and I'm so very glad to occupy my little corner of it and have you all for my neighbours!

Rachel xx

thanks and a tune for you...

Thanks all of you for your lovely messages earlier.  I really appreciate you taking the time to send a hug or a kind word, it has made a real difference to my day.  I find it hard striking the right balance here, between honesty and misery, or positivity and inauthenticity (is that even a word?!) - I don't want to act like my life is always perfect, but I don't want to bum anyone out either, and of course I know everyone's got their own problems to deal with, a lot of which are probably far more challenging than mine.

I'm sure my worries are being amplified by the school holidays, the rain and being woken at a hellishly early hour by the boys - giving us all a lazy day with no expectations seems to have helped my mood to lighten, combined with the magical feeling of being supported by you lovely bloggy women, most of whom I've never even met - it's a lovely thing. 

Here's the tune that I listened to today that helped me to get a grip, it's beautiful and wistful, not too happy but not too sad, and from my one of my favourite films...RIP Tony Scott, what a sad thing, puts my minor wobbles into proper perspective.

I hope you didn't mind me sharing my blue mood, I think maybe I should have saved that post as a draft and waited to see how the day panned out, but at that moment I needed friends and you were there, thank you.

I hope you have a beautiful, joyous weekend.

Rachel x

a day at the seaside...

Happy rainy Monday to you!  You wouldn't know it by looking out of my window right now (it hasn't stopped raining all bloody day!!), but yesterday afternoon the sun shone and the wind blew and we piled into the car for a few hours of blustery seaside fun....

M modelling Mummy's shades...

I did the balancing, M added the face...

 

more rock balancing...

and more...this one looks impossible from this angle!

 and then the boys chased each other around like lunatics for a bit before we came home...

a lovely family day, no squabbles or tears.  Nice and relaxing after the craziness of M's party the day before, which went very well but left me and F in dire need of a stiff drink!

So I'd like to put a request in to the universe - more sunshine please!  I can cope with rain while the kids are still at school, but in 2 and a half weeks the summer holidays will be here, and I would like to spend them doing more of this kind of thing, rather than endless days of lego in pyjamas (which I love, but that's what we do all winter!). 

What did you get up to at the weekend? I hope it was fun whatever it was!

Rachel x

friday's favourite fabric

Hello lovelies, hope this Friday finds you happy and ready for a relaxing and reinvigorating weekend.  I've been busy with all the usual stuff this week - toddler playdates, dodging raindrops and wishing for sunshine, attempting to tame the chaos of our tiny house full of stuff, a teensy bit of sewing when the opportunity arose. 

Since my last post I've been avoiding looking at stuff to buy online, and whenever I feel like looking at gorgeous vintage fabric I open my cupboard and look at my lovely stash, and feel grateful for the abundance of deliciousness that I'm already lucky enough to have.  BUT...the lovely Tanya of Pomme De Jour made my resolve wobble earlier this week, when she showed me this...

oh dear.  All resolve melted, and I decided that one little treat was in order.  So now I'm back to being good, but it's a bit easier knowing that a piece of this scrumminess is on it's way to me in the post from France.  And for any of you also taken by it's charms, she has some left, and some of her other stock is on sale at a whopping 25% off - including these treats...

and these lovely bits of vintage goodness for the kitchen...

What can I say?  She is a temptress.  I think I was quite restrained in only getting one bit of fabric, no?  If you like what you see, pop over to the Pomme De Jour Etsy Shop, and don't forget to use the code Summerpomme at the checkout to get that 25% discount.  She also has an Ebay shop and a website with sales on too - I haven't looked recently at the stock in those shops, I'm being good remember?! 

Have a lovely weekend, and hello to my new followers, thanks for joining me in my Rainbow Vintage Home! 

Rachel xx

wise words...

 

I haven't really felt like blogging for a while, and this is one of the reasons why...I love the internet, but I find that if I spend too much time online I end up wanting things that I didn't even know existed 5 minutes ago.

So this week I have been taking time out from t'internet - to focus on what I have, and spend time with my partner and kids doing fun stuff in the real world.  It's been nice! Hope you're having a lovely weekend.

Rachel x