The clothes show

Last weekend, Dove Cottage's bedroom and spare room, the rather grandly named Blue Room, looked very much like the store rooms of a clothes shop.

It all started on Saturday, when I made a start on packing for our holiday. Since our destination will once again be the UK, a suitcase full of flimsy Summer frocks might be a bit too optimistic, although I will obviously be taking some of those.

But, as regardless of the weather we will be out and about a lot, I will also be taking several pairs of trousers. After investing in some nice pairs of red and green trousers last year, I now went a step further by acquiring two pairs sporting very Polyester Princess-worthy flower prints, so that in the not unlikely event that the weather gods are once again up to no good, I will at least be able to look the part.

I tried out a mountain of blouses and short-sleeved jumpers to wear with them and managed to whittle them down to a manageable shortlist. Even so, travelling light will not be on the cards, but why should I, since we are travelling by car?

Have no fear, I won't be taking that much! No, these bags contain part of my vintage stock, which I'm keeping for selling at our local flea market in July.

There's a total of five boxes and four large bags, so the day won't be very far off when we, like Vix, will need to have a shed built in our garden!

Don't you love Angelica's stylish Summer outfit, by the way?

There's a reason why my vintage stock had to come out of our bedroom's built-in closet: I had invited a friend for a private shopping session on Sunday. I'm glad to report that she went home with no less than six dresses and a blouse!

Now look what happened: the dress I'm wearing here was unearthed from one of the bags. Why on earth I was thinking of selling it, I do not know, but I presume it was its beige-ness that put me off. But isn't that print gorgeous? 

I wore it on Saturday, playing an on/off game with an ancient lilac short-sleeved cardigan from New Look. I do wish I'd picked it up in more colourways back then!

I chose sky blue for my belt and necklace and added a translucent brown, vintage butterfly brooch.

My sandals are my turquoise Miz Mooz misfits: I bought them several years ago at a ridiculously reduced price at the tail end of the sales, as the colour of one of them was rather faded. The difference in colour was soon rectified by putting the other one out in the sun for a while, so that it is now hardly noticeable.

The mountains of clothes were doing my head in by then, so we left the house to go and water the plants at Jos's son and daughter in law, who are currently travelling in Canada.

We stopped briefly at our most local charity shop, and wouldn't you know it: I found more stuff.

These two new-to-me stretchy frocks came home with me.

As I was once more making use of Angelica's services as a model, I took the opportunity to dress her in this funky vintage frock, in a lined cotton fabric, which I found at Think Twice the other day.

I came across this playful play-suit on the same day. I've always had a penchant for play-suits - 1960s Barbie has quite a few of them in her wardrobe - but I haven't had one myself since the late 1990s.

At under € 5, it was futile to resist this one, which will be perfect to wear around the house on hot, sticky days.

Meanwhile, the Sempervivum, or houseleek, on our kitchen windowsill is flowering for the very first time, and at the back of the garden the frothy lime green flowers of Lady's Mantle have joined the plant's soft, downy leaves.

A glut of gooseberries awaits us, but how strange that only one of them has turned red already. Jos reckons there is something wrong with it. 

Nothing wrong with our white currents, apart from the fact that most of them have ended up being eaten by a cunning pair of local wood pigeons!

Jos has cut back some of our garden's jungly growth, so that we can see all the way to the back wall, where a sweetly scented honeysuckle is growing among the profusion of greenery provided by a rampant Virginia creeper.

Here is what I was wearing on Sunday. 

I love this sturdy cotton skirt, with its ruffly hem trimmed by orange rick rack. This, and the orange flowers, prompted my choice of top, a cap sleeved blouse sprinkled with black and white dots. 

My footwear were as a pair of ancient orange ballerinas.

The vintage necklace consisting of intertwined black and white plastic beads were the obvious accompaniment, while I brought out the green of the leaves on my skirt by pinning a green-based micromosaic brooch to my blouse.

I wore the skirt again on Monday, but with a different top: a green, lacy, short-sleeved knit jumper. 

I'd overlooked this one when I was packing, but I think it would be perfect with the first pair of floral trousers, so it went straight into the wash, after which it has joined the others tops in my suitcase.

And so, we have come at the end of my post.

I'm officially on vacation now and, after we have finished packing tomorrow, we will be up bright and early on Saturday, when we're off to the UK.

So, no posting from me for a while, as I will be mostly off-line for two weeks, although I will be reading your blogs when time and WiFi allows.

See you in July with lots of adventures to share!

All mixed up

As the weather continued to be all mixed up, we were kind of at a loose end on Saturday before last.

There is only so much charity shopping you can do, so in order to get our weekly vintage fix, we drove down to the town of Geel, just under 60 kilometers from where we are, where there's a delightful shop selling all manner of vintage and retro goodies, called Expo 58.

The dress I was wearing was picked up at a charity shop retro event back in 2014, when I plucked it from a mannequin after I'd fallen in love on the spot with its groovy pattern.

It is handmade and fully lined, and it's got a little slit at the top, which is not serving any purpose at all since it shows more of the same fabric. The skirt has got an inverted front pleat and there's a self fabric belt with a round blue buckle.

There are two reasons which keep me from wearing it to death. One is that it's cotton and needs ironing. The second is its rather annoying high collar which starts bothering me after a couple of hours' wear.

In order to break up the monotony of the pattern, lovely though it is, I added a white pearly brooch and a pink double string of pearls which belonged to my Great Aunt Josephine.

I think this three quarter sleeve mustard cardigan is perfect with it, adding a contrasting colour. Wearing a cardigan means I can add another brooch, and I chose a large, early plastic one with carved flowers.

I'm taking tentative steps towards pattern mixing, following the example of the queens of pattern mixing, Beate and Goody, by wearing a black and white checked jacket on top. It came without its belt, but needed one to give it more shape, so I added a fuchsia pink belt and pinned a large fuchsia flower corsage to its lapel, both tying in with the pink in the dress.

Burgundy Clarks shoes and a small reddish brown handbag were the final touches.

Oh, and did you notice my watch strap? The watch's original strap needed replacing when I suddenly remembered this strap, part of a lot of original 1970s watch straps found at a charity shop about two years ago.

Back to our little trip! We have been to the shop before, the last time was in December, when I blogged about it here, and we never leave the shop empty handed.

Lovely owner Stefanie is one of my readers too, which I'm really chuffed about!

There was a rail of vintage clothing in the shop's entrance, and I'd already chosen an armful of dresses to try on, when Stefanie noted all the commotion and came out to say hello.

Three of the dresses came home with me, and I'll be making a point of wearing the two summer dresses before the summer is out.

The third dress, a red plaid long-sleeved one, was actually made in Belgium. Look at that lovely label! I didn't like its buttons, and have already changed them, so that it's ready to wear. If the weather keeps going downhill the way it does, this may be very soon ...

Other things we bought are:

A delightful yellow wicker basket.

A box of stain remover, to be put into our kitchen display cabinet with our other vintage packaging.

Two paper grocery bags advertising La Vache Qui Rit (a.k.a. The Laughing Cow) and Spa mineral water.

We have framed them and hung them up in our kitchen.

Finally, a mystery object made from sturdy carton, featuring two Scottie dogs. I'd not idea what it was until Stefanie told me it was a backboard for hanging a daily tear-off calendar.

Sunday brought a mix of clouds and some sunshine, with a couple of showers thrown in.

We stayed at home and I continued with my mending. The upside of the unseasonable weather is that I have actually reached the bottom of my mending basket. Yes, you have read that right! I even finished shortening the lining of a winter skirt which had been waiting since, well, last winter!

This is one of the other things which had been languishing in my mending pile.

Right, that's a funky piece of fabric, but what is it?

I won't leave you in suspense for long: it's a maxi skirt!
It was far too long, so  needed shortening, and as it is lined, I needed to shorten that as well. Quite a job, as I've been doing it all by hand, having yet to master my Mum's sewing machine.

Isn't that print absolutely fabulous?

I did some more pattern mixing by wearing it with an orange polka dot shirt. Not very adventurous, I know, but I'm still learning ...

On top, a blue linen mix jacket I charity shopped a couple of months ago.

Oh, and the fringy suede shoes were a present from my friend Ann.

We met on the bus (one of the perks of public transport) and she lives nearby, and last Friday was her very first visit to Dove Cottage, where she joined me for coffee and cake and a catch up!

Oh, and linking to Patti's Visible Monday!

Bye bye Wales: brooches and bad weather

It's time to wrap up the remainder of our Welsh holiday, but if you've come here for the beautiful scenery, you may be sorely disappointed.

If you remember, I ended my previous holiday post by saying it would be the last bit of sunshine we'd see during our holiday.

Sure enough, on Monday night we could hear the rain pitter-pattering on our cottage's slated roof until the early hours of the morning, but thankfully it had eased off a bit by the time we got up.

After two days of walking, we were ready for a spot of shopping, so we decided to go down to Carmarthen, about an hour's drive away.

First stop was the covered market, with a myriad of stalls, selling all manner of things.

We then ventured into the town itself. Carmarthen is quite a pleasant town with a mix of the usual high street and independent shops. And quite a few charity shops too: it was our quest to visit them all!

I struck gold at the very first one, where I found these two brooches. The little ceramic daisy is slightly damaged but I'll wear it all the same.

It had started drizzling by then and, feeling peckish, we dived into M&S and had lunch at the café.

From the café's first floor windows we could see people closing their umbrellas, so we considered it safe to continue our shopping expedition, hitting the rest of the charity shops and finding more brooches in one of them.

Other buys included books and a short-sleeved shirt for Jos, who also bought another flat cap in the sales at Edinburgh Woollen Mill.

We'd kept the best for last, as there is an Aladdin's cave of an antiques centre in King Street, which we remembered from last year.

I'd hardly walked in when I noticed some boxes of vintage costume jewellery at the bottom of a display cabinet. When I asked if I could have a look, the shop assistant handed me box after box (at least five or six of them) full of wondrous stuff so, while Jos was off browsing elsewhere, I had the mother of all rummages, and came away with 13 brooches!

More rain on Wednesday! Foggy and damp, the view across the estuary was more suited to an Autumn's day, if not the verdancy of the fields and foliage had given away that it was, in fact, the height of Summer.

To combat all the greyness, I dressed in a vintage blouse featuring yellow and pink blowsy flowers, which I accessorized with yellow and pink flower corsages, yellow beads and cardigan and a funky patterned scarf.

It was a pity I had to cover it all up with the black Gore-Tex again!

Hoping against hope that the rain would ease up any moment, and we could do something outdoorsy later, we drove into Cardigan. But the rain was stubborn and wouldn't budge, so that there was nothing for it but to do a bit of shopping. Again. In fact, we went in and out of every shop that even remotely took our fancy.

At a delightful shop called the Crafter's Cwtch, we browsed for presents for our faithful cat sitters, and I picked up some hand made brooches for myself: four ceramic ones and one made from a piece of polished beech wood.

In one of the downstairs shops in Cardigan Market, I found two more vintage brooches: a turquoise sunburst, and an  oval one depicting a posy of pansies. In fact, I already had the pansies brooch, which I bought last year, but as you can see this one is in much better condition.

The small blue flower brooch was hidden away in a cabinet at Barnardo's and cost just £ 1. It's got a big sister which I bought at a flea market back in March, and which Cate told me is 1930s, so surely £ 1 was quite a bargain!

Exhausted from all that shopping, a coffee break was in order, making use of the café's free wifi to catch up on some blog reading ...

If by Wednesday evening the rain seemed to have eased off a little, it came back with a vengeance during the night, this time accompanied by a fierce wind, which made the temperature drop even further.

The wind was driving horizontal sheets of rain over the estuary and on the gentle slopes opposite cows huddled together in the shelter of a handful of inadequate trees.

Thursday really was a day of inescapable wetness.

Watching the forces of nature at work from the eyrie of our cottage's bedroom window, we felt kind of ship-wrecked, as if cut off from the rest of the world. Apart from the howling of the wind, there was an eerie quietness, as even the eternally squawking gulls were silent for once.

Now, what were we to do? Having exhausted all the wet weather options in previous years, and not being in the mood for any repetitions, there was nothing for it but to drive to Pembrokeshire's county town of Haverfordwest which has a multitude of charity shops.

The trouble is that the road down there goes straight through the Preseli Mountains, passing near its highest point where, even in fine weather, a cold wind is blowing and a misty veil can often be found shrouding the landscape. In these circumstances, there was a dense flog and zero visibility, making it a precarious drive.

Having made it to our destination, we grabbed the last parking spot and ventured into town, the hoods of our Gore-Tex coats up against the freezing cold, as it was barely 10°C.

Even the most avid charity shoppers would have been shopped out by now and we halfheartedly trudged from shop to shop, finding nothing much to cheer us up. Apart from some books, I only came away with a brand new looking pair of pink Van Dal sandals from Oxfam.

Stopping several times for coffee, at one point accompanied by delicious Welsh cakes, was the sensible thing to do!

Jittery from all the coffee, we decided to call it a day and return to our cottage, curling up in front of the wood fire with a book.

All very cosy indeed, but this is not what we had come here for!

Finally, our last day dawned and guess what: it was still raining, although the eternal howling of the wind had quietened down.

We spent the morning packing our bags, almost glad that we'd be going home the next day.

Thursday's rain and cold had supplied me with a lip full of cold sores, so that my lower lip was about twice its usual size.

As we had to go food shopping, we nipped into Cardigan for an hour or so, while it was relatively dry. In a side street, we discovered a sweet little shop we'd never been into before, selling a mix of crafts and vintage stuff, where I made my final purchase of three brooches!

After a restless night, we had an early start on Saturday, and after breakfast with the sun streaming in through the windows (aargh!), we bade our final goodbyes to the cottage which has been our holiday home for the last seven years!

Cae'r Aber, we will miss you!

White magic

After a couple of delightful, soothing-for-the-soul Spring days, by end of last week we were back to the same old can't-decide-what-season-it-is weather.

It's not exactly been cold, but it was grey and overcast with little or no sunny spells, as well as never-ending rain, especially on Saturday.

Nevertheless, our garden is starting to look quite green again, with many shrubs coming into bud. There is one plant which has especially been relishing the rainfall which came after last week's Spring weather.

Our Clematis armandii, planted many years ago to grow through our large Lilac bush, is positively groaning under the weight of hundreds of starry, creamy white flowers.

The plant has obviously benefited from the drastic haircut Jos gave it last summer.













All we need now is lots of sunshine to release its delicate almond scent, which will make sitting on the bench in the Lilac's shade a true delight.

Saturday we called in at some of the charity shops we didn't have time for on the day of the retro event, to see if they had any goodies left.

I wore this made in Sweden "Aspens" dress, made from a polyester material called "asplene-jersey".

It has alternating bands of light and dark burgundy sprinkled with a squiggly print, which is denser on the darker bands.












There's a touch of lilac in the squiggles, which prompted me to add a lilac belt and lilac/blue cardigan. I chose opaques with a pattern of burgundy rose buds.

Looking for the perfect necklace, I came across this long forgotten silver tone pendant.

The brooch, one of my favourites, is a silver tone knot fringed with little chains ending in tiny pearls.

The first shop we went to still had tables full of stuff, which they had sorted by colour: quite a lot of orange and avocado! However, nothing really caught our eye. I did find some more frocks though, one of which you'll get to see later in this post, as well as a fabulous full-length dressing gown.

There was hardly anything left at the other shop we visited, but their bookshelves are always worth a browse, and I came away with these two, for € 0,70 each.

Obviously, I couldn't leave behind Vita's biography.

The other book, a "noir" set in 1930s Bayswater, made me think of Mim. By pure coincidence, just two days later Mim posted a review of a non-fiction book by the same author, D.J. Taylor, called Bright Young Things!

The flower print background, by the way, is my new-found dressing gown!

Before returning to Dove Cottage, we had coffee and cake at the shop's recently opened café.

On Sunday, we had my niece's 15th birthday party to go to in the afternoon, and I spent the morning pottering around the house, finally getting to grips with some long overdue filing of paperwork. I had been procrastinating and kept shoving the pile of paper to the back of the cupboard, always finding something more interesting to do instead.

Call me rash, but I've already made a start on my Spring/Summer wardrobe switch by putting away the very warmest of my dresses, assessing what I wore and what I didn't, and why.

The dress on the left is a wardrobe staple which has seen me through many a winter. With its multi colour Paisley pattern, it can be combined with lots of my cardigans. I wore it here.

I almost got rid the one on the right, which I wore here, and I'm so glad I didn't. It's not going anywhere now.

These two plain dresses didn't see the light of day this winter. They are 100% new wool and lined, making them quite thick and heavy.

In fact, I didn't wear the brown one last winter either, so maybe it's time to say goodbye.

I'm going to hang on to the purple vintage C&A one as I love its colour, shape and detail.









This leaves Monday, for which I booked a day off.  Mr. S. urgently needed some new stuff, and since the chazzas here haven't been coming up trumps on menswear which isn't miles too big for him, there was nothing for it but to do some retail shopping.

The day was as dull and uninspiring as the - shock horror! - shopping centre we went to.

I wore one of the dresses I bought on Saturday's charity shopping trip.













Nothing dull and uninspiring about that one!

The absence of a label makes me think that it was handmade and the Crimplene-like fabric's print is bright enough to cheer up the greyest of days, not to mention the blandest of shopping centres!

I love the narrow V-shaped slit running down from the collar, ventilation which makes all the difference for a menopausal girl like me!

The plastic ring was a flea market find, and echoes the dress's print.

Thankfully, the shopping centre was rather quiet on Monday morning. Quite a difference with a Saturday afternoon, when wild horses couldn't drag me there!













Mr. S, who easily gets bored with clothes shopping for himself, bought two pairs of well needed jeans, three shirts and a jacket.

Oh, alright, here's a sneak preview of the jacket and two of the shirts.

The rest of the week whizzed by uneventfully, so that by the time you are reading this another weekend has rolled by.

The weather forecasters have predicted a continuation of this week's Spring weather, so let's hope they are right for once!

Have a great one!