Home London 2012

I spent the day at Home on Monday, where I was eyeing up new trends for 2012 for the Guardian. It was an amazing show - they have obviously worked really hard to only get quality designers and brands in. While you can't buy what you like at a trade show (it's not open to the public), it is great for eye candy and you don't have that market traderish crowd selling you stupid kitchen gadgets like some so-called 'interiors' shows do. Anyway my write-up about it all is here, but here's some more pics of things that caught my eye...

Ferm Living

Muted warm wintery things from Verso Design

Marimekko's new Helsinki range, based on an original 1950s design out the archive

Donna Wilson's lovely throws

Swedish ceramics at Sagaform

Handprinted, homemade bags and cards by Alexandra Snowdon

Ace biscuit cushions by Nikki McWilliams

Searching for squashy comfy cushions

On our grey sofa, we have these cushions, which I haven't had time to take a picture of so I shall describe instead. Hand embroidered flowers, in red and cream silk threads dotted with little mirrors in the threadwork at the centre of each one, they were passed down to me by my mum, who in turn had them from her mum. Actually, that's a bit of a lie. They weren't so much passed down to me as I spied something (a bit of mirror) in the airing cupboard, thought "Ooh, there's something shiny", stood on the edge of a shelf to reach for it, nearly broke the shelf, pulled the cushions out, made a mess of all the other linen in there, thought, yes, they looked nice and stuffed them in a bag to take them with me to London. Great tactic for stealing stuff from your mum's house, works every time.

Anyway. The cushions are lovely, but they are old. Some of the small bits of mirror are falling out which as well as leaving gaps in the embroidery is also a potential health and safety issue for, er, small nephews and er, grown ups too. Every now and then, R will be sitting on the sofa, struggling to get comfy because a small shard of glass may or may not have inadvertently cut through his jeans. It makes me feel bad and so this lengthy preamble explains why I am currently spending my hard earned money and valued time doing something very important called cushion shopping.

Today I ordered this one from Roddy & Ginger although really it's not to replace the existing cushions, but more to join the owl on the green snuggler armchair. Which wasn't what I was looking for, but anyway.

but a pair of these would go very nicely, thank you, with our charcoal grey sofa...

I don't have a bolster cushion but if I did, I'd love this print from ThirtyFive Flowers

This is awesome (and on sale!), but I know R will probably hate - one owl cushion is pushing it; an elephant called Elle would probably push him over the edge.

Although check out the rest in the range: Mr Franck the Fox! Aristo Katt! - I would gladly share the sofa with this lot

On a more grown up note (tis a living room, not a nursery. Not that we need a nursery. Just to make that clear), I do very much like Ferm Living's geometric designs...

But perhaps not enough to spend nearly £56 on. Luckily, that same Etsy seller, ThirtyFive Flowers, has something similar for a lot, lot less, although she only has one of them and I suspect that now I've blogged it, it'll sell out by the time I figure out which ones I want to buy.

I have long loved these (we have the bolster ones in the bedroom) but it'd be pretty boring if we had the same ones in one room as in the other too so that these rules out

While these are pretty gorgeous too

So anyway. That's my shopping round up. Basically, to recap, I was meant to buy a pair of cushions for the grey sofa but ended up buying one cushion for the green one instead, which means I've failed miserably in my shopping task. Never mind! There's always Franck the Fox!

Perfect Victoria Sponge Wedding Cake

Victoria sponge, raspberry and cream, big and squishy and ever so slightly wonky: my wedding cake, just as I'd imagined it to be. Photos by our wedding photographer Anna, and cake by Nicola.

(I promise not to go all wedding blogger on you)

Calling all interiors journalists and editors...

(Magazine pics from here)

I've lost count of how many "How the fashion editors dress"/"What our fashion team wears to work" features ever since the likes of The Devil Wears Prada came along and made working on a magazine seem glamorous. But as someone who is always peeping through windows to see how other people live, I'd rather sneak a peek at what someone's entire house looks like, not just what the contents of their wardrobe are.

So with that in mind, I'm collating a little feature project for a newspaper, asking interiors magazine writers, journalists and editors, the people behind the magazines we all buy and devour, if they wouldn't mind sharing how they live for once... so if you're someone who works for an interiors magazine, and lives in an interiors dream, then please do get in touch - tweet me @huma_qureshi and I'll fill you in with more. Thanks!

Hand stamped thank you cards

An afternoon of easy crafting a whole bunch of post-wedding thank you cards with my much-loved, much-smudged Cox & Cox stamping kit. Simple and sweet.

New house updates

It's only been less than three months since I moved into my new home with R after our wedding but I'm quietly quite chuffed at how much we've managed to get done in that time to set up home. It's always been really important to me to make a home that puts a smile on the face of whoever walks in the door (mostly that would be the two of us), somewhere that reflects our personalities and is just a place you really, really want to come back to. A while back, I interviewed Zoe from Conversation Pieces, for this Independent piece about setting up home as a couple, and she said she simply wanted to make a "happy home" - no style-conscious point, no being over precious. That's how I feel about it too.

Anyway, regardless, in the real world there's still a fair amount that needs to be done (The spare room is The Room That We Don't Talk About, and there's still a major curtain purchase we're waiting on) but I am more than pleased with what we've done so far...

The first thing we did was put up shelves on either side of the window for my book collection which, yes, are organised by colour (ahem). The snuggler armchair was a total impulse purchase and totally unplanned (and unbudgeted for - ouch) but it's turned out to be a favourite buy... the perfect home for my beloved owl (more owls coming: watch this space). The print above the snuggler only arrived today, but I fell in love with it when I found it on Bodie and Fou.

Next up is our feature wall (with the wallpaper we all know and love); the beautiful small oak dining table a generous wedding gift from one of my brothers. Another gift, this time from one of R's brothers, is the vintage wooden railway waiting room sign hanging above our dining hatch. Both gifts were, er, tactfully suggested by me.




The hallway is our little gallery space - and I can't live anywhere without a chalkboard door so here it is behind our front door. Since I work from home (my writer's bureau is in the lounge, next to the snuggler armchair, but it's messy and I don't know what to put above it yet so no photos for now), I need all sorts of motivation so currently scribbled on the blackboard is this quote found on the Pinterest board of a lady called Judy who I happened to interview for this piece in the Independent today about working from home in style.

In the kitchen (oh to finally have a proper kitchen - my last one was basically a glorified cupboard) we have open shelves for bits and pieces we've collected along the way...

I'm terrified they'll fall down if I put all my cookery books on them (um, they already have done so once), so those are lined up neatly against the work surface now.



The main bedroom walls are pretty bare for now, as I continue my quest for prints to hang above the bed and wait for our wedding photos to arrive, but we do have a feature wall with the Miss Print wallpaper (remember? In the end, we opted for duck egg blue).

I adore the slightly mismatched lampshades from Sasha And Elisabeth - we deliberately didn't want anything too catalogue-perfect (a "look" I detest with a passion) so the bedside table lamps aren't identical. I love the random red bird on this one (which happens to be on his side).

Our bathroom is done in shades of white, dark wood and duck egg blue - mostly because I loved the colours in Lisa Stickley's bath range - and this is what greets you when you step out the shower.

So, so far, that's it. I've ordered a few more prints, one from Etsy, one from Roddy & Ginger for the hallway "gallery" but am still musing for more - any suggestions?

Um, hello, I'm back

(image above from Paper Michelle)

I don't really know where to start this post, seeing as I haven't blogged since August 21st, which was nearly three months ago. For this I feel terrible, because there's nothing worse than those blog posts that start "Gosh! Hello readers! Sorry I haven't blogged for ages - been busy!" but in my case, I hope that at least my excuses (packing, getting married, moving flats, going on honeymoon, getting back into work) at least seem vaguely valid.

And so here it is: in the last three months, my life has changed on basically every level. It's not been so much a whirlwind, but more a very ready change of direction. Her Little Place is now Someone Else's Place, and my new home is Ours, so it's out with the floral rugs and Eastenders and in with living a new life which isn't just about me, but where someone special is always in it. It's taking in the big three-0, growing up, growing together and enjoying it all. People ask me what it's like: I tell them it's calming, peaceful; our new life is quietly content. Being married is a good influence on me.

There's a ton I could blog about over everything that has happened - the wedding eye-candy of invites, cakes (plural: try a ten-tier victoria sponge), flowers; the colour; the photos; the videos...but I can't quite whittle this huge, mammoth day into just the details (sorry). Somehow, talking or blogging about my wedding cake doesn't really give this turning point justice. Then again, I could always blog about the honeymoon, Rome-in-the-autumn, driving with the top down, our creamy, dreamy little boutique hideaway in Puglia, the pomegranate trees, the olive groves, the burnt orange sunsets... now that really was something.

And now there is real life, of what to make for dinner and settling into routines, and the bringing of families together round Sunday roasts, and work, trying always to write, battling with ideas that might make a sale vs ideas I'd simply like to write, hoping for 'another' big break and that next year will be as fruitful as this one.

So as the year really does come to a close - there's not even that long to go, jeez, it's December on Thursday - my thought for the day is this:

This time last year, nothing I had done this year - whether it was getting married or suddenly, totally randomly being pulled out of the blue to be on national radio every week - was expected, or predicted, or at least not by me. This year has proved to me that at every turn there is an opportunity, a new beginning, a promise that waits for you, and that when things are crappy, there's always bound to be something better round the corner. That you must have faith, and faith brings everything to you. Face it; the cliches are true - beyond all the cheesiness, every cloud does have a silver lining, when life brings you lemons, you might as well make lemonades and everything really does happen for a reason. I'll be blogging more in the new year (promise), maybe not always about what you're normally used to finding here, but in the meantime, I leave you with this:

2011. Best. Year. Ever.