Mad hatter's tea party and a DIY hat

Saturday night a few friends of mine put on a 'Mad Hatter's Teaparty' at a local bar in honour of Alice in Wonderland's 150th birthday. They had been planning it quite a while, with fancy dress, teapot cocktails and a teapot decorating competition, it was -excuse the pun- JUST  my cup of tea. Down to the very blend and spoons of sugar. Just perfect. So as you can probably tell, I was very excited and had planned my outfit and hat weeks ago.

Yum yum and yum, cakes made and decorated by the lovely hosts. Unfortunately I didn't get the chance to take any proper outfit photos, but honestly although perhaps I looked "in costume" I was wearing my normal clothes... (Spin Doctor skirt with chinese style silky blouse from a charity shop, on top of a corset from ebay.)

This was the skirt I was wearing.

Please excuse my rediculously excited expression. As you can see, I also wore a teeny top hat fascinator (made by me, DIY post coming soon) a key and pocket watch on a necklace, and drank my g&t from a Hello Kitty teacup. There was an agreement from the manager of the bar that party goers could bring their own teapots to drink from, and would charge accordingly as to how much liquid each could hold. I also had a teapot full of cocktail for £8, which was delicious and very reasonable.

 

As you can see there were some wonderful and dedicated costumes, I always have time for good fancy dress, so I rather felt as if I was cheating by wearing my normal clothes! 

Did anybody else celebrate the birthday of Alice In Wonderland?? 

Anniversary engagement

I certainly had an exciting time this past weekend,  because it was both mine and Rob's 3rd anniversary, and he asked me to marry him! It was funny and confusing because he has been talking to friends about planning it for a while now, and before we had Reegan we were planning a trip to Iceland and I think thats where he was intending to propose. He was also planning to ask me on Sunday when we went out for our anniversary dinner (more on that in a moment) but he thought one of our friends had let the cat out of the bag, so he proposed on Saturday to still surprise me, but I didn't even realise he was going to in the first place! So all a surprise really. Saturday afternoon we took Reegan and Inca (our dog) for a walk to Blaise Castle estate and walked up the big hill to the castle.

The spot where Rob proposed

As you can see, it's tiny, and you can't go inside it because it's a grade two listed building, except on the special open days, which don't happen often. At the estate museum there are pictures of what it looked like when in was completed in 1798 as a sort of summer house that the owner at the time used for entertaining guests. It was beatufully decorated in the gothic revival style and even had a kitchen in the cellar for dinner parties.

Anyway. We got up there and Rob suggested we sit down as if he was tired, so I said sure why not, and bent down to get Reegan something to eat from the pushchair basket, and turned around to see him on his knees holding out the ring.

It's currently being resized. ALL I want to do is wear it!!

I couldn't quite believe he was really asking me and I just stared at him for a minute and I think I asked if he was joking. My heart stopped and I felt all fluttery and dizzy and I just couldn't process what was happening. How dramatic! But of course I eventually said yes, and off we went to the pub where our friends were waiting with a bottle of Prosecco.

Then on Sunday we went out for dinner at a place called Steak of the Art, which is a steakhouse/art gallery, it was super cool and the food was lush! (Imagine me saying that in my West Country accent.)

Those blue lights over the bar were colour-changing

Alice in Wonderland booth carved by chainsaw

The style of decor was very modern and industrial looking, so not entirely my cup of tea but it was still very fascinating to be surrounded by so much art.

Sorry for the overload of smug couple selfies. The last two are mainly so that you can see my makeup in more detail, which was a grey cut crease shadow with a feline flick and my trusty red lippy. I'll  be off to work tonight so happy Monday everybody! :)

Gothic Wedding guest attire (at a "normal" wedding)

Saturday evening my family and I had the pleasure  of attending the wedding of a close family friend. Well, not just the bride specifically as both of our families have been friends for a very long time indeed. Both my granny and hers have lived in the same street for more that forty years I think, and have been very close until she sadly passed away last year. Everyone in my family would call her auntie just as everyone in hers would call my gran auntie. So we knew a lot of people at the wedding, and as they have all known me since childhood they are quite used to my eccentricies, and do infact embrace them. I got a lot of compliments on my green hair and outfit (and of course plenty of fuss over the baby, which she loved). The wedding also had a running theme of Alice in Wonderland because of the 150th anniversary on it's publication, which of course I enjoyed very much. So heres my outfit:

As you can see it was a relatively conservative dress from Hell Bunny, with the skirt hanging just above the knee with a sweetheart neckline and net panel on the chest. I love the collar and the green anatomical print because it's my style, whilst still looking respectable, and not too attention grabbing either because the last thing you want to be doing at a wedding is stealing attention from the happy couple. I also tried to get a close up of my makeup but unfortunately before my mum arrived and took my outfit photos Reegan was being a little clingy, so I took the opportunity to just take some selfies with her. But I think you can see fairly well that I just went with a simple fawn coloured eyeshadow and black eyeliner, with wispy-natural looking lashes and my current obsession- the Pretty Zombie Vamp lipstick. You can't see from the photos but I wore my Iron Fist Timmy Chew ballet pumps, mostly because they are my go to summer shoes and also because I rarely wear heels. I get self concious because I'm quite tall anyway and heels make me feel like some sort of freakish giant. I was also planning to straighten my hair (something I don't do often to avoid damaging my bleached hair, which is in a remarkably good state at the moment) but I ran out of time so I just left it to dry naturally and do its thing, and just added the skeleton hand clip to keep my hair from my eyes.

A friend of ours (who by the way is male if this makes any difference to the opinion) told me the first time I wore this dress that it wasn't wedding appropriate, because  I was 'test driving' it and wanted to know what he thought. He told me that "anything to do with skulls or death should not have any place at a wedding." I didn't really know what to make of that, seeing as both Rob and I are a bit obsessed with skulls so naturally if ever we do get married they will probably be featured in the wedding somewhere or other. But then I do think that sometimes we kind of forget that we aren't all that normal so it's kind of hard to judge how other people will react to our tastes, and a lot of the time I forget that people would react in the first place. Using skeletal body parts (or bats or lace or studs or horns) to decorate my brightly coloured hair is something I do on a daily basis so when someone notices and says something as if it's out of the ordinary I don't always know what to say. (Every day is halloween?!)

Do you think my outfit was wedding appropriate? What would you wear to a "normal" wedding - would you tone it down a tad or just be yourself?

Lunatick Labs and Pretty Zombie reviews

I just recently realised that I haven't done many makeup posts lately, especially not reviews so even though these are things I bought a while ago I thought I'd still share my thoughts. I really liked the products and they come from small cruelty free brands with amazing customer service and values I can really get behind.

Pretty Zombie Cosmetics 

As far as I know these guys only do the liquid-to-matt lipsticks, but they have a lot of really nice colours and the packaging is spot on. I got the shade Vamp, which is just a deep red so not that exciting but I do have my eye on the black and a couple of the grey/purple shades too. What I love about this (and also what I haven't yet found with any other product in this category) is that you paint it on and it dries pretty much instantly. One coat is all you need as the pigment is quite intense, and when it's dry it is so light on the lips that I always forget I am wearing it, whereas with Lime Crime but especially MUA velvets it can feel a bit dry and crusty and I feel as though I can't smile without it all flaking off. Not this one though, even the wear time is impressive- I wore it all night long on friday and never needed touch ups, although the product does transfer onto glasses etc. Personally I think this is one lippy that you definitely should try if you are into matt lips, and is actually really affordable at $12 each, so less than a tenner for me in GBP!

Lunatick Cosmetic Labs

I actually have two products that I bought from them and I really love both. They are another small vegan and handcrafted cosmetics company and they have spooky-cute themes for everything, with beautiful packaging (I actually bought the Coffin Pallet just because the pallet was pretty) and incredible shade selection and pigmentation.

The first product I bought from Lunatick Labs was the Appocalipslick in the shade Coven Cream. It is a lovely grey-beige and also the first nude lip product I have ever owned, I wear it a lot because it is the perfect deathly nude for someone who likes the dead girl look. Again this product goes on liquid (but quite thick) with a doe foot applicator but it doesn't fully dry, and is basically your average wet-to-touch but not shiny lipstick. This also has considerable staying power, but because of it's consistency is slightly more comfortable to wear and is easier to touch up later. As I mentioned before, I purchased the Appocalipslick a week before the eyeshadow pallet, but never received it and after receiving the pallet surprisingly soon after placing the order I decided to email the company about the missing first order. I have to say, their customer service team are truly wonderful, and endeavored to do everything in their power to solve the issue. By the time we had established the cause of the problem they had already sent me out a replacement product that arrived quite quickly also. It transpires that for some reason my house number was not on the address label, so without a legible delivery address the Royal Mail simply returned the item.

This is the coffin pallet, and as you can see from the photo the design is quite spectacular both inside and out, made from thick coated cardboard with a strong magnetic closing mechanism and a little bat shaped mirror inside. There are a number of themed pallets you can choose from but I couldn't decide on one, so I took the option of customising my own. I really liked that you can choose your own five shades from their entire collection because I wanted to enjoy every shade and not end up with one or two unused pans as so often happens with makeup pallets I find.

Here are my swatches, applied over Urban Decay PP with a slightly damp brush, as I have found this produces a more vibrant result with most darker eyeshadows. They have an incredibly soft and delicate consistency with a slightly shiny finish, and are prone to crumbling away to dust quite easily, however this is explained on the website I do believe, and each pan comes with it's own press should this happen. I just take extra care when handling and don't put any pressure on the product with my brush when I use it and have only used the presses once or twice. I don't have the shade names either, and I don't know whether this is because I ordered a custom pallet (but from what I can see the standard pallets don't include shade names either) so maybe just a little slip with the shade names included might have been useful. Other than that I have had a small issue with the wear time and creasing, but I'm working on the right combo of primer and technique at the moment, but it's  not a big enough problem to stop me using them.

So overall I have had good experiences with these companies and undoubtedly would shop with them again. I am planning to bery soon infact... Anybody have any other indie favourites? What are your experiences with this sort of company?

Big Weekend

Sorry I haven't posted much at all lately! June and July are and will be very busy months for us, we have been out almost every weekend and will be for probably the next six weeks yet. It is good though, all the socialising is helping my state of mind greatly and I'm  feeling nice and normal, almost my own age again... ha! This weekend is also Download festival, and the first time in four years that I haven't been, even though we only went for one day last year because I was so heavily pregnant at the time. It was strange not to be there, and if we weren't so busy I might have been sad about it. I think we might go next year though so I'm quite happy with that.

The reason we didn't go to Download festival was because I had promised to take my twin cousins to see Enter Shikari on friday night and they needed me to be their "responsible adult" because it was a club venue and they are only sixteen. I was actually really looking forward to it because I used to listen to that band a lot when I was younger. Unfortunately for us though the gig got cancelled, because one of the band members had been to hospital for some reason that morning so obviously unfortunate for him too, but the shitty thing was that the gig was cancelled at the very last minute, because the venue had already opened and started letting people in before the cancellation was announced. We didn't actually find out until we got there, so the boys went home (although I promised to take them to Download with us next year to make up for it) and I went to the pub because I had a babysitter until the next day and I couldn't bear to go home alone with Rob out at work! Some friends and I went to a couple of pubs before going to the club where Rob works and partied all night long. It's called the Bierkeller and friday nights are "Psycho Keller" which ia basically just a rock/metal night. We got excessively intoxicated and it was great. I have fully stopped breastfeeding now and with Reegan taken care of for the night I could really let my hair down, something I haven't done in a long time! I only have a couple of very rushed outfit pictures so apologies for the crappy quality!

After thinking that I had absolutely nothing to wear I ended up with a completely new outfit, although technically not new because it's been sitting in my wardrobe untouched for a while. I got the dress (although its very short and I wore a velvet mini skirt under it) on sale from Necessary Evil back when I was pregnant because it was a steal and just crossed my fingers that it would eventually fit me. Luckily it was perfect and super comfy! The huge collar necklace was a birthday gift from my auntie that I hadn't yet gotten the chance to use, and my tiny knuckle duster clutch was a Christmas present from my mum that I also hadn't used. Win all round!

Saturday morning we had to drive almost two hours to my  mum's house to pick up Reegan (normally it only takes an hour but the traffic was awful) and have some lunch with my gran and little sister before we made our way back to Bristol. I had a nice chilled out evening with my daughter whilst Rob went out to work again and played Sims when she went to sleep.

Sunday we went out with friends to the Bristol Tattoo convention, and I do believe it was the very first one. It was a fun day out because we started at the pub where I work, got the bus for the short ride into town for the convention, and then had food out before we went back to the pub again. In the end we were out for about seven hours and Reegan did very well considering she spent much of it stuck in her pushchair, but when we got back to the pub we let her play in the garden to let off some steam. Then we had to have a bath when we got home because she was totally caked in mud. But very happy. She really enjoyed being the centre of attention all day and I'm so glad we went.

Here are some pictures of prints we got from a guy called Marcus Jones who had a stall at the convention; Popeye because Rob loved him; Wednesday because we both loved her; Frankie because I am obsessed with him, and his bride because we couldn't separate them! They are all such amazing works of art and when we actually have our own place they will be proudly on the walls.

Little holiday

So last weekend  we went on our first family camping trip, just the four of us. The baby, the dog, me and the Protector of our Realm. Rob and I used to go a lot before Reegan was born and our dog Inca would usually sleep in with us and steal all out blankets, but she had to sleep in the car this time because she is in season and we were worried about her squishing the baby in the night. It was also the first time we used our new tent, a four man standing height that has inflatable tubing rather than poles. IT WAS AWESOME. We got it as an investment, so that we could have affordable family holidays for years in it and the fact that it's inflatable meant that Rob could assemble it in about five minutes just on his own whilst I entertained the dog and the baby.

We went to a place in Devon called Park Farm, and it was a really nice family campsite with lots of animals and lots of random trampolines everywhere. Really great for kids and the grounds were clean and well kept and the facilities were lovely too.

Reegan playing in the tent

Family selfie at Powderham Castle with Rob doing the babywearing.

My yummy cream tea at the Castle 

On the second day (after I spent the first day collecting leaflets, because I have a notorious obsession with them) we decided to visit Powderham Castle, because it was only half an hour away from where we were staying. It wasn't huge, but it was very beautiful. I managaed to take pictures outside, as you can see from the lunch we enjoyed in the Castle courtyard, but due to their insurance policy you are not allowed to take pictures  inside and you can only take the guided tour, no tour guide:no entry. The castle belongs to the Earl of Devon and I think it was his son or grandson that was just moving back in with his family that day. I have never visited anything quite like it, our guide was very friendly and relaxed, and had lots of audience participation with sending children to find the secret doors and such. Every room had a story and there was so much family history surrounding it all, you really do feel as if you are a guest of the Earl himself, with his family photos, portraits and heirlooms in every room. We were even treated to a little personal story from his son about a pair of haunted  sea shells he had recently placed on a shelf. I ended up taking the tour by myself whilst Rob spent time with our girls in the sunshine and I enjoyed it all the more because  of this. So sorry I can't show you any pictures  but if you're ever visiting the South West of England, south south I mean, then Powderham castle is well worth a visit I can assure you. It is also where the staircase scene from the film Remains of the Day, so if you have seen it you can imagine how incredible the rest of the house is.

In conclusion we had a short trip, but successful and wonderful and only the beginning of the many memories we will make together as a family.

I lost myself....

I feel like this past year or so I have been stuck  on this wild ride of complete life change, things have turned  upside down and I feel as though I lost my identity along the way. It's  only very recently  that I have started to feel like I'm  'out of the jungle' of new motherhood and the dark places I have been to are fading memories. Of course sometimes they still come back to bite me in the ass with stinging clarity every now and then. My hormones still  haven't  settled down yet and at times I feel positively  evil, but the bad times are in the minority these days and I'm  not stuck in constant  mummy mode any more.

When I was pregnant  the thought of losing my sense of self was a scary one, and I was determined to go through pregnancy, birth and new motherhood still the same as before. Unfortunately  it does change you, but I think for the better, because  I have now realised that I am still my own person, just with a few improvements and a lot more life experience. I have learned  a lot about myself in this past year, and actually  become proud of myself and who I am.

I used to spend 24/7 with my daughter  in her early days and weeks, we were bonded, like so many say 'the motherbaby' because throughout  the fourth trimester a baby's  needs for her mother are so great and they are almost the same entity. But slowly Reegan has grown, the transition of her starting on solid foods once she could sit up, leading to her crawling and now almost walking has really helped in healing my broken state of mind. Don't  get me wrong  I love being a parent and being depended on by this incredible little person is a privilege, but it really drains you, emotionally and physically. Our breastfeeding journey is almost at it's end, and whilst I feel  ecstatic to have gotten this far after all the difficulties at the start, I feel it is the last step between the most challenging babyhood and new toddler independence (?!). I already am feeling different  because I have more freedom to dress as my truer self and not think that as a mum I shouldn't be wearing baggy jeans and boring cardigans. I dont feel bad leaving her to dye my hair, and I put on makeup more often than not now, which  is a big thing because when I felt like I  didn't  have the time to put it on or was too tired and it really made me feel shitty and a bit alien. Being back at work has also given  me encouragement to focus on persuits outside of my domestic comfort zone. I have goals now. I'll  share them with you in the hopes that it will  keep  me on track!

• Attempt making my own clothes like I have been promising myself for so long
• Book some driving lessons! This is a hard one though because I still feel apathetic towards the notion of it and still am not sure if I have room in my life for it right now. 
• Buy that German language course that has been sitting in my Amazon "save it for later" for more than a year.
• Carry on working on the dolls house. Something I have not seen to for some time now. 
• Start writing again. I have projects that I never finished from about 3 years ago, and finally I have decided to resurrect my plans for publishing. I'm  sory of doing market research at the moment. It really is my lifelong dream  to be published. I have been writing since I was about six.

Wish me luck?