Music To My Ears

sugarhill boutique dress with hell bunny caridigan

Dress: Sugarhill Boutique | Harry Potter Necklace: Gift from sister (but lots similar on Etsy) | Hell Bunny Paloma Cardigan: Tiger Milly (Christmas gift – lots on Amazon) | Belt: Topshop | Heels: ASOS

Whoo, I’ve had a pretty busy time recently, although I’m not too sure what I’ve been busy doing! Work has seemed a lot faster and busier than usual, but unlike when I was teaching, I tend to forget about work at the end of the day and never carry any stresses over from it at home, which is awesome. I’ve just been doing stuff recently – all sorts of random things that make me feel busy but actually aren’t things.

For one, I already talked about my minor bed disaster. We managed to get that sorted out fairly painlessly though, with a partial refund from Groupon and a fixings kit arriving quickly from Sleep Softly, then spent an evening putting together our new bed and mattress. One thing to confess is that there are some of our my and Ben’s favourite television series on at the moment, including: Death in Paradise, Silent Witness, Broadchurch, Father Brown, Jimmy & Jamie’s Friday Night Feast, Benidorm, Food Unwrapped and Food & Drink, and we’re also catching up on the last series of Lewis, then Midsomer Murders and The Great British Sewing Bee start tonight – crazy! Yeh, I’m definitely not cool for admitting my love for all these series right now, but there you go – that’s apparently how I’ve been spending my time! My only question is, why are all the best things on at the same time?!

We also had Ben’s family round for lunch on Sunday and cooked a veritable feast of curries including a veggie Keralan curry with green beans, chickpeas and spinach; a slow cooked Gujarati lamb curry; Bombay potatoes; normal rice and cauliflower rice – all homemade! We also went for a quick drive past our new house since they hadn’t seen it yet, then had to speed away as the owners appeared since we looked very suspicious – not that the zooming away would have helped that!

I’ve also done quite a bit of sewing recently – I made the Watson bra from the sewalong at Cloth Habit which I’m pretty impressed with (see here). I’ll be doing a full post on this soon, so watch out for that! Last night I finished a very summery version of the Simplicity 2444 in beach hut fabric with a collar – I made a sleeved version of that here and it’s my favourite memade dress so far. And even though the weather is definitely not up to it (high winds with on and off snow and sleet), of course I’m wearing the beach hut dress today, oops! I ordered a dress form last week too, so that’s been added to quickly growing sewing collection – she’s all dressed up in my Christmas dress at the moment, but you’ll meet her soon enough I’d think! Oh, and you should probably know that she’s called Maeve – I decided.

Anyway, finally onto the outfit here! I won this dress in a giveaway by Sugarhill Boutique a couple of years ago but have managed to never show it here. I don’t wear it very often because it’s slightly shorter than I prefer to wear at the moment and the material is very thin, but it’s a lovely colour and has a cute pattern. I tried to dress up with a few more accessories here too – while I may not have beautiful diamond eternity bands like these to wear, I do own loads of pieces of jewellery and accessories that rarely get any wear. So this Harry Potter necklace – a gift from my sister a couple of years ago – and my old Topshop belt came out of hiding! And while the cardigan may not seem hugely exciting, I find it to be! I got this from my parents at Christmas – it’s a Hell Bunny one that I’d wanted for a while but never bothered to buy, and it has become my favourite staple, so much so that I ordered one in red and one in green too – oops. They just have a lovely shape which works perfectly for the type of clothes I like to wear.

And final note to my ramblings, I promise! Tonight is Brownies and I’ve volunteered myself up for a sewing activity! I was originally planning to do an easy cross stitch with the girls but my practice one took ages to do and I thought would bore them since they wouldn’t have a finished product to take home at the end of the evening. Instead, we’re going to make little pouches/purses out of scraps of fabric I have left over. I’ve cut them into squares and rectangles, then pressed and folded down some edges, so all they’ll need to do is sew the edges together in a square then they can sew on buttons and decorate them – shouldn’t be too hard I hope. The girls are about 7 to 9, so should be capable of doing most of the things, but there’ll definitely be a lot of help, especially on the sewing machine! Interested to see how it turns out in the end though.