All Things Lovely

Tote Bag Gifts And Wrapping

Happy Monday! Hope your weekend was lovely. Mine was busy but fun. The weather was so horrible here in Sydney, so not many fun outdoor activities.

I've been away from blogging for so long that I'm about to show you something I made for Christmas 2011. Yep, 2011. I love making a small gift for my close girlfriends each year. Half the fun is dreaming up what to make about twenty of.

Inspired by the beautiful tote bags made by the talented people at The Purl Bee (side note, that blog is so lovely! I want to make everything!) I decided to make up a bunch of their great 20 minute tote bags for Christmas gifts. Using home decorator weight fabric from my favourites; Heather Bailey, Joel Dewberry and Amy Butler, I whipped them up. Well, whipped is probably not the word! They took me a bit longer than 20 minutes, but once you get on a roll you can get them churned out pretty quickly.

When it comes to wrapping gifts, I'm incredibly fussy and I really prefer to wrap things in boxes! I couldn't find any cheap enough, so ended up sucking up my OCD and wrapping everything in brown paper bags. Much cheaper!! Plus I actually loved the look. It's amazing what a brown paper bag, doily and some string can do.

Are you a handmade gift person? I love seeing people get all excited about it, and especially seeing them using their bag, makes it very special.

My Favourite iPhone Photos Apps

I am little obsessed with Instagram at the moment, especially since I'm doing the Photo A Day challenge. Friends sometimes ask what apps I use for all my photos so I thought I'd share my favourites. This isn't a sponsored post, just my favourite and most used apps.

I take the majority of my photos just with the camera on the iPhone. I never use the camera in the Instagram App, and will only edit my photos in Instagram if I'm in a hurry. I do love the Brannan filter though. I want my photos to start in a high resolution for printing later on. 

Mt first normal step is to open the photo on Afterlight. This app is awesome. I crop and add a filter generally through this app. You can actually do pretty much everything in it. Change the brightness, edit the contrast, sharpness, shadows etc.

Once I've done that I often want to add a filmy grain to it. Especially for my Photo A Day projct, I try and have some consistency with the grain and the frame. For my grain I use Blender. I've downloaded lots of overlays such as Mextures by Merek Davis, NDPATTERNS by Simon Fletcher and brenoverlays by Bren at Shalecubs. I am a little in love with overlays. Blender basically merges two photos into one, so you can do awesome edits with other photos. I'm a fan.

Once I've jazzed it all up, I'll either move it to Snapseed or Camera+. Snapseed I mainly use if I want to add some nice soft focus, and fiddle with some other things.

Last step is moving into Camera+ to add the border. I decided to stick with a thin black border for all my photos but they've got some other really nice frames. You can also add some more great filters through this app.

What are your favourite apps? I'm always on the look out for more! Happy iPhoneography!

Wednesday Wish List

Are you as into online shopping as I am? I find it so dangerous! But living at the bottom of the world, often we don't have much of a choice, there are just better (and cheaper!) things online.

Here are a few things I'm crushing on at the moment. In all honesty though, the Coach bag is on it's way....oops.

One Pride & Prejudice Two Coach Candace Carryall Three Coach Keyring Four Gold Heart Ring Five iPhone Case

Weekend Happenings

Happy Monday! Hope you had a lovely and relaxing weekend. Mine was busy but all together lovely. I got to spend a lot of time with some of my favourite people, and lovely Sydney hasn't quite figured out we're halfway through autumn. The weather was so warm and sunny.

I spent Saturday with a friend in the city, starting with brunch at The Grounds of Alexandria. If you're around Sydney and you've never been I really recommend it. The wait is usually about 45 minutes, but they have a great takeaway area, and then beautiful gardens to sit or wander through. We managed to find a table in an old greenhouse where we sat for ages drinking coffee and fresh lemonade and eating delicious bacon and egg rolls.

Sunday was so warm and sunny, so there's no other option but to hit the beach. I headed down to Bondi with one of my besties for brunch. We then just wandered around and enjoyed the views, and the water. There is nothing more beautiful than Sydney beaches.

Aren't the Bondi Icebergs pools just gorgeous. The colours are spectacular!

On the way home we popped in at Gelato Messina. Oh.My.Goodness. This stuff is sooo good! I was a piggy and got three flavours (I defy you to narrow it down to less!)

How was your weekend? Hope you got to do, eat and see lovely things!

Handcrafted Espresso Cups

My friend Shaun is one of those fabulous people who loves food and coffee. I mean L O V E S it. He's an incredible cook and I'm pretty lucky that he cooks for me fairly often. When his birthday came around late last year I wanted to find him the perfect gift. Cue...Kylie spending hours spent on Etsy.

Well, Artet Manufacture came to the party. I finally stumbled upon these divine handcrafted ceramic espresso cups. BINGO. I kept looking around as they're not cheap - but they were one of those things I just could not get out of my mind. You know that feeling? Nothing else will live up to what you've found. I was so happy when they finally arrived. They really were everything I'd hoped for and more.

Photos copyright Shaun Mowrey

Meet Lady Berkeley

Happy Monday! How was your weekend? Hope it was lovely and relaxing.

If you follow me on Instagram, you would have already seen a little puppy has come to share my home. My flatmate desperately wanted a puppy and so Lady Berkeley moved in about two months ago.

Isn't she adorable?! I promise I won't continually flood my blog with puppy pictures, but she's just so cute! Being a labrador, she's definitely a challenge but she's going well at puppy pre school. I'm expecting big things!

March Photo A Day

I shared earlier that this year I had committed to do Fat Mum Slim's wonderful Photo A Day Challenge. I'm pretty happy to say that three months down and I'm still on board. It's so easy, all you do is get the list and take a photo every day that relates to the prompt given. I love the challenge to my creativity every day. Here's what I shared on Instagram for March.

Ikea Herringbone Rug

The old Ikea hack. It's one of the best isn't it?! After being inspired by so many people online with the 'paint your own' Ikea rug I did my own about a year ago. One of my dearest friends always loved it, so for his birthday this year I painted an Ikea Egeby rug for him (lucky guy).

Although the pattern I used was three colours and very structured, he only wanted two colours, and I decided to make the pattern a little more freehand after seeing this amazing herringbone patterned wall. Using Dulux White on White and Domino I painted the first coat fully white, then taped it up rather haphazardly, and covered the entire rug in the black. Make sure you get enough paint. I started with one litre of each colour. I ended up having to buy more, so it turned out to be about one and a half litres of each colour to fully cover it. Also, I recommend buying a cheap brush as you'll destroy it.

I added an additional step in this rug in that I sprayed it with a clear sealer after everything was dry. I find that my rug gets dirty quite quickly so I'm hoping the clear sealer just helps it to stay a little bit cleaner.

Fortunately he absolutely loves it!