A leathery new look....

Yesterday it was Mr Husband's Birthday.  Happy Birthday my love!  To celebrate we went to Sainsbury's during the day (like you do) and then my dear Mama baby-sat for us in the evening so we could go to the cinema to watch the second part of The Hobbit.

In honour of Mr Husband's birthday I decided to treat myself to a new skirt, bought whilst at Sainsbury's. I seem to get quite a lot of clothing from Sainsbury's, they do some great stuff. Anyway, this time I plumped for something a little different for me.  I'm used to wearing a pencil skirt and have many in different colours and fabrics, but this time I was somehow compelled to buy one in a kind of rusty red leather-type material.  It isn't real leather, in fact it's machine washable (yay) but to be honest that makes me like it all the more!

Probably one of the things I like the most about it is that it's quite slimming.  Not being a particularly stretchy fabric it can REALLY hold everything in place, in fact, I am pleased to report that despite buying this post-Christmas pig out it's actually a size 12!  My first size 12 for about fifteen years!  Yay!

Here's what it looked like on.....apologies for the slightly fuzzy picture, I seem to be having some issues with my camera at the moment - I suspect a small, sticky fingered person may have gained access at some point....

I decided to wear it with quite a simple black jumper as, in better light, it's actually quite a bold colour.  I'm really pleased with it, a bit of a different style choice for me. Mr Husband says it's quite saucy, but he's a secret perv, so we can't go by what he says....

It was originally labelled as being £22, but is currently on sale for £11, can't complain about that!

So....what do you think?  Any suggestions on colours that would go well would be most welcome!  Anyone else wear leather or leather-look clothing?  I have an image of Ross from Friends in my head, so any tips that would avoid me having to make a talcum powder paste to free my legs would be great ;)

Love, love,



P.S On an entirely unrelated note, and hence not worth an entire post, I've decided to move the buttons of my favourite blogs to give them a page of their own.  Click on the Blog Roll tab above for a little look.  If anyone is interested in a button swap, please shout!  Over and out xx

Magic Moments.....My kingdom for a hat....

We are lucky enough to have been invited to another wedding this weekend in London. My very dear old friend Berg is marrying his gorgeous girl. Berg & I have each other a very long time and he's always been someone that I trust and look up to, I value his opinion and he sees through all my rubbish. He does not like being woken up on holiday by Tallulah and I gleefully jumping on his bed. This I have learnt.

Travelling to a wedding throws up a whole host of logistical problems. Do we drive? Get the train? Drive part of the way then get the tube? Stay in a hotel? Ugh! So many things to think about! 

However we get there, I've decided what I'd like to wear. Obviously my first port of call is always Vivien of Holloway, my favourite dress shop in the world. I'm going to wear this dress:

Their beautiful 1940's dress in Valentine Rose. One of the wonderful things about it is that it doesn't crease, so however we travel, hopefully I won't look too squashed.

I love the hat that this model is wearing, and tried so hard to find something similar, but to no avail. I trawled Etsy but as I only had a small hat budget, it proved a little difficult. In the end I had a brainwave! Proper middle of the night flash of inspiration stuff....

I invested a whole £7 in a very plain hat from Etsy, complete with veil. It's very simple hence the low price.

Here's how it looked on...

Bit worried that if the dot falls in the wrong place I might look a little, erm, Hitler-y, but I'm just going to have to hope for the best on that front!

I used the hat as a base and armed with a glue gun I'd sneakily borrowed from my friend Bob I added some paper roses that I was given as a Christmas present ages ago. I've never really known what to do with them...

I spent ages deciding on the best position and arrangement, then glued them onto my hat and whacked in a few carefully placed leaves for good measure and....voila! 

The result!!! Complete and perfect match for my dress for a princely £7! 

What do you think? Bonkers or brill? 

I'm chuffed as a chuffed thing from Chuffingham! Now pray it doesn't rain......

I can't be the only person to have fashioned accessories from bits and bobs laying around....tell me your tales!! 

Love, love,

Mummy on a budget...

I don't know about you, but I find paying for everything that children need on small budget takes more than a little bit of planning.

We don't have a lot of spare cash each month, and that's fine, we're perfectly happy and we get by.  When I look back at my old life I can't work out where all my money used to go?  Having a disposable income seems to be a thing of the past and little treats for myself, a few pairs of shoes to cheer myself up or new dress every week, maybe a couple of takeaways if we're feeling lazy, well, they're all distant memories!

But I'm not complaining, I get quite a lot of satisfaction from actively seeking out good deals and saving money where we can.   Before Wiggles' was born I did quite a lot of research into finding the best possible price for nappies, because they're not something you can do without really are they?  I always knew that we would be going down the disposable route, for us it just isn't practical to use cloth nappies.  We share part of our house with my parents and my brother, one of the rooms we share is the utility room which houses the washing machine and the tumble drier.  Our allocated wash days are Tuesdays and Thursdays with access at the weekend for emergency washes....all very regimented, but we know where we are with that!  With this in mind there was no way I wanted to have to live with buckets of smelly nappies potentially hanging around from Thursday until Tuesday, no thank you!

Wiggles is now a whole year old and I would say on average she uses approximately 5 - 6 nappies a day.  Sometimes more, sometimes less.  Back in the day when Biscuit was a baby we would buy our nappies from the supermarket and we would choose what ever was the best offer.  This meant we used a lot of a different brands of nappies and to be honest, most of these were fine.  The only downside was that because our little girl slept through from quite an early age we needed an overnight nappy that could cope without being changed for anything up to twelve hours.  Most brands are alright at this, but my personal favourite brand was always Pampers.

On a side note whilst researching this post I discovered that you can no longer buy Huggies nappies in the UK or Ireland, I'd missed that one!  I can't really understand why Huggies would suddenly stop selling nappies as they always seemed to be a popular brand, but there you go. I believe they're still making Pull Ups, Swim Pants and wipes so they've not disappeared entirely.  We used some free Huggies Newborn nappies when Wiggles was born so it must be a fairly recent thing....

Anyhoo.....I would find that we spent a lot more on nappies by buying them from the supermarket as there wasn't always a good offer available.  Plus I almost never come out having only bought nappies, usually something else will have found its way into my basket and these unnecessary expenses can really add up.

Following a lot of research we've switched from buying supermarket nappies to having them delivered through Amazon's Subscribe and Save service.  The difference it makes is incredible!  They're the cheapest by far at £13.71 for 132 nappies (we use size four).  They are delivered to the door for no extra charge, so I save on petrol and I don't end up buying anything that I don't need. I can set the delivery schedule so that they're delivered every month, or at any other interval that suits and I don't have to think about it, I know we'll never run out.

We've just discovered that we can also get Wiggles' baby formula through Subscribe and Save as well, she has Hipp Organic Follow On Milk, which has worked really well for us, and having it delivered this way recently saved us an amazing £3 PER BOX!  Although annoying this has recently gone up a little again, Amazon prices do tend to fluctuate a little occasionally, but it's still a lot cheaper there than the shops.  You can also bulk buy Ella's kitchen pouches, vitamins and all sorts of other things, even coffee, so it's very much worth a butchers!

This isn't a sponsored post,  I am just really, really cheap!  Anything that saves us money completely wins my vote!  Has anyone else ever tried Subscribe and Save?  Or do you have a nappy secret you can let me in on?  I'd love to hear from you!

I don't really like a completely picture-free post, so here's Wiggles with a very reasonably priced nappy on her head!