A shabby chic weekend.

Hello blog chics. I trust you are all having a nice weekend in the sunshine, or not, if you live where I do. It's been raining cats and dogs here! I'll how you some of the cats further on!
Hubby and 'she who is proficient at separating eggs' have gone to Taupo to race their 1973 purple toyota corolla, and it will be almost freezing there with a wind chill factor of about minus 97, so I didn't go!!!

"She who is proficient at separating eggs' is also fairly proficient on a wet race track, so hopefully the car is still in one piece when they get back. Some times it's not, and Hubby emigrates to the bloke's shed for the next three weeks to fix it, and I don't see him except to feed him.

This is the view outside my kitchen window. There's a small tsunami in the bird bath created by the huge amounts of rain and wind.

So back to the Shabby Chic weekend. I stayed at home by the fire with the magpie cats.

But I have a confession to make. I was in Poppies book store on Friday, to take my mother in law shopping for books for the great Grandies first birthdays. She bought Richard Scary's The Great Pie Robbery for Cooper, and a beautiful little book called Rabbit's Blueberries (I think) for Lucy. I just LOVE Poppies book shop. They have such unusual books there. But I am supposed to be being extremely thrifty on account of being temporarily retired at the moment and a kept woman. But I have been covetting that latest Rachel Ashwell book SO much. I look at it every time I go to Poppies, and it's on my Amazon wish list, and ... you guessed it. I bought it!

It's beautiful. I just gazed at it all weekend, and read it from cover to cover. The text is a bit same old same old if you've read her other books, but the photos and the styling, and the lovely Shabby Chicness are just the stuff of dreams. Magpie Chic is really shabby chic without the celebrities I think, and on a much smaller budget.

This is my favourite page, but I couldn't get the blogger to pick up that I've rotated the picture, so you'll all just have to turn sideways to look at it. It's the gorgeous shabby chic prom dresses.

The Magpie Cats know when I am home alone, and both get on my bed in the morning to read Rachel Ashwell. Normally they wouldn't have a bar of each other. But they do both get up there when I'm on my own. Funny how they know.The ginger cat also tries to eat my toast!

This is my one and only shabby chic prom dress. But I have my eye on a fantastic blue tulle one in my favourite vintage shop, but alas it costs more than that jolly Rachel Ashwell book!!!

'She who is proficient at separating eggs' chose this one for her first "prom". It looked wonderful on. I had the matching coloured gloves too, but she drew the line at that!

This part of my post should really be called a hundred ways with table cloths! But really it's just two ways, so can't exaggerate. I use all the scraps in my raggy ballerina quilt, which is still under construction.

These tablecloths were in my "box of serendipity" from the auction mart a few weeks ago.

I blogged about it here.

I'm totally into fabric roses at present. I embellish everything that can stand embellishing with them. I stay up way too late at night sewing this stuff because I'm very pre-occupied during the day just being me, and going from one thing to another. Then I think, well I really should actually sew that instead of just looking at back issues of Victoria and being totally inspired, but producing nothing....

I have a guest blog thingy to write for a Uk website called shopaholic too, which I'm intensively planning in my head, but also that's where it's stayed, all week now. It'll be about up-cycling vintage fabric and op-shop finds into kid's clothes. So I'll put a link up when that goes on, because I'm so excited that they asked me. They gave me their editors new blog pic of the month award too, which was so exciting, 'cos now I know not just my Mum reads it LOL!

This is what I'm planning to make for Lucy's birthday, and I have exactly about 24 hrs to finish it and get it in the post!!! So better get that one out of my head and onto the sewing machine too, but first I just have to watch Ruth save a Country House!!! I love how mean she is to the people, and how they are so eccentric they don't even notice!

See ya.