Recently I've been...

Wearing
Pyjamas, 24/7. Due to being all poorly and sofa-bound, I haven't been bothering to get dressed (don't worry- I've still been showering). When I left the house yesterday to go to the supermarket it actually felt weird to be wearing shoes. 

Reading
Angeli - The Pirate, the Angel & the Irishman by Amy Vansant. Amy kindly sent me a copy to review, and it was exactly the sort of story I needed to distract me from my aches and pains. Fast-paced, funny and engaging, with a totally kick-ass heroine and a few sexy scenes. Ooh, and to make it especially awesome - I helped design part of the cover. 

Image pinched from Amy

Eating
Too many carbs. Feeling constantly nauseous meant I spent almost a week eating nothing but plain jacket potatoes, pasta, and porridge because they were the blandest food I could find. By day 5 I was able to stomach small quantities of some fruits and vegetables, but the combination of carb overload and lying down all day has definitely caught up with me. So much for making my bum vanish!

Appreciating
Excellent puns in the Mod Cloth sale, and the name of this perfume brand from Anthropologie:

Apparently it smells like rose gardens, high teas, and happy accidents

Feeling
Unbelievably grateful and so, so lucky to have Tom in my life. He's been amazing at looking after me, like a bearded Florence Nightingale, alongside keeping the house in order, picking up my prescriptions and cooking me the world's blandest food (on purpose!). 

Baking
Peanut butter cookies. Once my appetite returned I was far too excited about being able to eat sweet things again. I haven't made these before and they ended up looking slightly different to how they should look...

They taste ruddy delicious though; like caramel-covered Crunchy Nut Cornflakes. 

Watching
Everything on Netflix. I raced through Season 2 of Orange is the New Black, and have now started watching Damages; a legal drama starring Glenn Close and Ted Danson, where everyone is basically a liar. I also watched two really funny movies; Killers, in which Catherine O'Hara totally steals the show as the alcoholic mother, and Running Scared, which confirmed my suspicions that Billy Crystal is the king of comic timing. I would heartily recommend all of the above.

Commenting
On a helluva lot of blog posts. Yet my unread Bloglovin feed is still at almost 300! 

Crafting
A few things for the kitchen, including jazzing up our resident whiteboard (which we use to record the contents of the freezer) by covering the edges in washi tape:

Close-up of the gorgeous woodland washi tape

I'm going to share the second project later this week.

Pinning
Pretty kitchen inspiration. Even though I'm hoping to one day replace our galley kitchen with a gorgeous country-style extension, I've decided to give our current kitchen a facelift. I'm pathetically excited about choosing a colour scheme and shopping for replacement door handles!

Disbelieving
How expensive it is to use a payphone nowadays. When I was in the Scouts we had to carry 10p in a handkerchief for an emergency phone call. 

Sixty freaking pence?!

I can only assume that BT eventually opted for a 60p charge because of the costs associated with enlarging coin slots until they can fit a human kidney. 

Cleaning
The house from top to bottom, in anticipation of playing catch- up at work this week. I know the last thing I'll want to do when I get home is vacuum, unless it's vacuuming up at glass of wine. 

I'm linking up to Hannah's weekly round-up, The Week That Was: Captured.

What have you been up to recently? 

Katie xxx

The one with the anti-party tricks

Hello lovelies!

Happy Friday Eve :)

Ever since I shared my super powers party tricks, I've been worried some of you may not be sleeping due to an all-consuming jealousy of my knife-shunning, fly-banishing, human-pigeony mad skillz. I've decided to burst that bubble, for the sake of your beauty sleep*, and tell you about a few of the ridiculously silly things I’m definitely not so good at. General life things, I mean - not crafty ones; although I have shared those before.

1. Making tea.
Despite being able to cook a number of fancy(ish) delicious things, time after time it’s the simple cuppa that stumps me. I desperately want to become The Perfect Hostess, and therefore offer all our guests tea on a half-hourly basis, but I often give them tea so wrong that it’s basically an insult.

I'm blaming my consistent failure on the fact I have my own tea so milky it matches my pasty skin. Perhaps it's just as well I'm incapable of tanning, as I'd otherwise be unable to demonstrate my tea preference. My own predilection causes me to second- and third-guess the amount of milk I put in other people’s cuppas, and it's amazing how much I can mess up what is essentially hot water, a tea bag, and milk. Sorry, guests!

Maybe I need to get some of these?

2. Spatial awareness.
I have absolutely zero spatial awareness, whether in relation to inanimate objects (like parked cars.... *ahem*) or my own body. Despite the fact I've had the same hips and elbows for nearly 26 years, I still appear to forget how far they stick out.

This e-card I spotted on Pinterest really rings true for me. On an average day I reckon I’m about 16% bruise.

[image source] 

For example, last night I managed to smash my own nose with a plastic lunch box. I'm just glad that I didn't have two black eyes today, because I don't know how I would've explained that at work!

3. Eating salad.
I've never understood the cliché of women ordering salad on a first date. Many, many moons ago, when I used to go on a date or two, I would NEVER have ordered a salad. Partly because carbs are way better than salad, and also because if I try to eat a plate of salad, I end up looking like this:

Luckily for me, since I met Tom I no longer have to make the "what to eat on a first date" decision. Three cheers for finding a boy who not only fully supports my love of carbs, but who also still thinks I'm beautiful even when I have salad dressing in my eyebrow. Hurrah!

What are you good at? And what are you oddly hopeless at? Please do share- I'd love to hear!

Katie xxx

* Not that you need it, you gorgeous things!!

When Crafts Get Ugly

Hello lovelies!

It's Friiiiiiidddaaaaaaayyyyyy. Let's all just have a little smiley dancey moment for Friday. 

I want to have a little sharing session today which will hopefully make you smile. It's an unnecessarily honest post because (with the exception of those people who witnessed these failures who have already been threatened with a cake ban sworn to secrecy) no-one on the internet knew I had failed at these things and I could've just kept schtum. 

But then I thought- No, Katie. No. Share your failings with the world to make them grin and to break the last taboo, which is to show that craft projects do not always end in glittery, button-covered, wonderfully-iced perfection- despite what Pinterest tells you! 

So, here goes nothing- two of my recent crafty failings to feast your lovely eyes upon! 

First things first, I mentioned earlier in January that I was planning to trial my own version of Color Me Katie's rainbow flowers. I did everything I had to do, which wasn't exactly much; putting food dye in jars (the same dye I used to make my purplecakes) then sticking the flowers in. I waited, and I waited. I went to bed (at night time, not with craft-fail related depression), woke up in the morning and literally RAN down the stairs like it was Christmas to see what had happened to the flowers. The answer? Nothing. 

Well, actually- that's not quite fair on this little guy. I've had the flowers in the food dye since last Sunday, and this is STILL the only flower with any colour to it. I think the other flowers must be fasting or something, or perhaps allergic to e numbers.... 

Ready for craft fail number 2? This one is definitely more impressively rubbish. Ages ago the lovely Ms Swaine popped over for an evening of fabric-sharing, tea-drinking and gossiping about mutual friends (only kidding, guys- we just talked about Made In Chelsea for four hours). Fran blogged about her productive evening (you might've recognised me in one of her photos) and I was planning on doing the same until I made what turned out to be felt roadkill. 

My idea was to make a beautiful little fox plushie that looked something like this: 

But what I actually ended up with was this:

Ooops!

Just look at that special little face!

Special Fox is still alive(ish) and well- I use him as a spare needle holder (Way to kick a fox when he's down, right?! Spearing him in the face with a needle!) and as a reminder that sometimes things don't work out quite right (but can still have hilariously wonky button faces).

Have you had any spectacular craft fails you don't mind sharing? 

Katie xxx