Mondays are for Mugs: Room39

I'm not one for new year's resolutions (well I mainly make them, break them and then curse myself for starting the whole sorry business) but in 2014 one of the things I'd like to grab by the proverbial horns is...knitting. 

I've dabbled in the dark arts of the yarn (including taking this ace class) so am on the path of mastering it and *this* is the year to do it.

Which is why I've chosen this splendid mug as an incentive to keep my needles a-clacking in 2014.

Knit and Loop Mug, by Room39, price £6.50 

The Perfect Tea Towel: Christmas

A tasteful Christmas tea towel? Now that sounds like a challenge...

Vera Neumann 1970s vintage Christmas Tea Towel, price £23.80 from Barking Sands Vintage on Etsy

Joy to the World Tea Towel, from Oh Little Rabbit on Etsy

Polar Bear Cub Tea Towel, price $18, from Jaturon 

Holiday Cheer Tea Towel, price £14, from Anthropologie 

Snowflake Tea Towel in sky blue and light green, price £7.51, from Violet Radiator on Etsy 

Rudolph Tea Towel, price £9.39, from Nesta Home on Etsy 

Christmas Kitch Tea Towel, price £5.01 from Kitsch Towels on Etsy 

Shake It Tea Towel, price £9.56, by Charlotte Farmer, from New House Textiles 

Have I missed any good ones? 

Mondays are for Mugs: Stacking Mugs

Stack 'em up. Stack 'em high. No not drinks, but this year's darlings of the Mug World (totally should be a thing) Stacking Mugs. These quirky kitchen additions can be cleverly used to make mug designs extra amusing. So here's my faves, any you fancy stacking?:

Tentacle Spectacular Mug Set, price $44.99, from Mod Cloth  

NY Brownstone Stacking Cups, price $19, from Feathered Home 

Mr Dear Set of Four Coffee Cups, price £45, from Jim Bob Art 

Stacking Skeleton Coffee Cups, price £55, from Phoebe Richardson 

Game of Thrones Crest Stacking Mug, price £20.06, from A Bird in the Hard at Etsy (one for @mrshorse) 

The Perfect Tea Towel: Ihanna Home

The optical illusion that makes this tea towel so fan-bloody-tasitc is as simple as a gently blowing breeze...

Experience Tea Towel by Ihanna Home, from Clippings, price €12 

Mondays are for Mugs: Hunkydory Home

Mondays are for Mugs! (Or y'know so are Tuesdays sometimes as we're not picky here now are we?!).

But shut the front door...I think I may have found my favourite festive mug...

The mug receiving this highest of accolades if the Fairy Lights Cup & Saucer from lovely Hunkydory Home. As I reckon it says everything I love about my kinda Christmas - bright, festive, fun and (above all) proper retro. 

Bring on the snow, Christmas pud and baubles - with this mug, I'm ready. 

Retro Fairy Lights Cup & Saucer, from Hunkydory Home, price £16

Blog Every Day in November #BEDN

Donna Wilson sample sale

Today I visited this weekend's annual Donna Wilson sample sale. I did rather well. These are *just* the bits I got for myself:

And here's the cushion modelled by Crumpet, I think she sets it off rather nicely:

The Perfect Tea Towel: Skandium

I love stories. Tell me a tall tale, spin me a saga, feed me a fable and I'm hooked. Which is why this tea towel from Skandium is today's Perfect Tea Towel. 

This tea towel isn't just about its rich colours and the folk style of the illustrations (I particularly like the leaf and flower detailing). It's also about the story within the design, for me the imagery conjures up strange stories of dancing in forests, hiding in trees and floating on rivers. However...

...looking at the name of the design (Lustgarden) maybe my imaginings are a little vanilla... 

Lustgarden Tea Towel, price £25 from Skandium

Faves: Humblesticks

I spied this lovely new brand over on the excellent Mad About The House blog (which while I'm at it can I heartily recommend for amazing style, great finds and for making my guffaw at my desk on a regular basis) and I knew pretty much straight away that they would be popping up as a Fave very soon...and here they are!

So the brand is Humblesticks and they are an ace new band who rejuvenate found objects and vintage furniture. Luckily for us they now started selling these cool, creative products online. They also have a very nice logo. 

My fave (lots of choose from with them though) is this Forest Grande Lamp, I heart the simple demijohn lamp paired with the Marimekko print, both set off by the fab green flex. Very nice. 

Forest Demijohn Lamp, from Humblesticks, price £145 

Mondays are for Mugs: Gold

This Monday is dedicated to the very best gold mugs. Ahead of the festive season when I reckon we could all do with one of these glittering lovelies. As these would be perfect either for Christmas day coffees with multiple sugars or filled right up to the brim with buck's fizz. Your choice. I'm team buck's fizz: 

Gold Lustre Mugs, from Luna Lighting, price £25 

Gold Fragment Mug, from Room39, price £14 

Gold Mug, from Howkapow, price £7.95 

Gold Heart Mug, from Big Tomato Company, price £17.95 

Drip Tease Mug, from Reiko Kaneko, price £14 

The Perfect Tea Towel: Yoke

A sweet design, a nice message, a lovely gentle peppermint colourway, but the clincher? you know I'm a sucker for a good chevon:

Forrest Tea Towel, from Yoke, price £11 

Mug Shots: Moi

New thing:

Mug Shots and is a new little feature on my favourite topic..cats! Nah not really, it's about Mugs of course (as a feature called Cat Shots might not have quite the same ring to it...). 

So here's how it works...I'm going to be ask some people that amuse me to tell me about their very own fave mug and hopefully find out a little bit more about them too. As I'm (you might have noticed) a bit keen on cups, I reckon you can find out a lot about someone's life through their teacup tales. Maybe one day I'll even find someone with as much passion for porcelain as me (unlikely but let's see eh?). 

But let's start with the first Mug Shot and in a totally non-self-indulgent oh-she's-giving-herself-another-reason-to-natter-on-about-mugs-way...I'm kicking this off with my own answers!:

Mug not to scale (note to self: must work out perspective when taking photos or buy smaller mugs)

Tell me who you are?: I'm Amy, but if you call me Daisy I won't mind and probably won't even notice. 

What do you do? And how do you find yourself explaining it to people?: Other than interviewing myself for my own blog...? I'm an Interiors PR by day. I tell people this means I get pictures of cushions in magazines. But they still think I work in advertising, marketing or am a PA...

That's a nice mug, why have you chosen it?: Why thank you, it is from the Our Workshop website and has become a trusty fave. It is the perfect shape to fit a proper cuppa and I think it matches rather nicely with my breton stripes too. I picked it out randomly from my ever-growing collection (read: hoard) in which I have far too many silly sentimental reasons to pick out most of them. And already kinda wish I'd chosen this mug (below) simply as a picture of me holding it would have been my favourite kind of ridiculous:

What have you got in there? Tea? Coffee? Something with a bit more of a kick?: Supermarket own brand Lemsip tonight. Keeping it classy.

Are you picky about porcelain?: I swear by the adage that you enjoy a cup of tea more from your favourite mug. So even when I'm home alone I only drink hot drinks from my very favourite china. I take it quite personally if I'm given a cuppa in a substandard mug (too small, bad design, chipped or uninteresting) so maybe I'm a tiny bit picky. And I take *far* too much time deciding who gets which mug when making a tea round (it's always going to be Russian roulette when you have a moron mug in the collection). 

Any mug nightmare stories? When I first moved out of home I only had a plastic mug, for some strange reason. I soon learnt that drinking Cuppa Soup from a plastic cup means the synthetic minestrone taste never leaves the mug....it being the only mug I had no choice but to persevere and drink many a cup of tea from it afterwards. Which were all, in hindsight, pretty damn disgusting. 

Best mug moments?: I knew the boy was a keeper when I told him about a mug I'd seen featuring a scale of different tea colours...and he had one made for me. Definitely a keeper.

He's a keeper

First cuppa of the day?: Wake up. Shower. Kettle on...always 

And the final traditional question:  How do you take your tea?: Milk and no sugar please (and it's pretty much a given that I'll be having one)

Moving House: Kitchen treats

An admission: this weekend I tried really hard to write Moving House post picking out five of my favourite cushions to cheer up the sofas in My Unrealistic Dream House (TM). 

However this turned out the be the hardest thing possible, it was too damned hard to choose. So I (quite literally) deleted the post and went back to bed. Possibly my man flu didn't help, but still trying to pick the best cushions caused an extreme reaction that I'm going to try and avoid today (although going back to bed would be quite nice).

Instead I've put together a collection of Kitchen Treats to inspire my cooking and dining in this new impossible gaff. Let's hope I haven't had to hide behind to the duvet again before choice five...what a cliffhanger, eh?!

FAVES:

Ceramic Jug Measure, from Future and Found, price £14 

WOW Storage Jar, from Solid ID, price £125 

Tall Glasses, from Saturday: Kate Spade, price $30 

Bunny Washing Up Rack, from Dutch By Design, price £27.50 

Skyline Chopping Board, from Pretty Dandy, price from £29.95

And look I even made it through! Might need me some cushion aversion therapy...or they could end up being my next Mugs (mmm mugs).  

Mondays are for Mugs: House of Hackney

This week's mug choice is just for me (ahead of my very sensible and not at all self-indulgent-mug-obsessive Christmas gifting plans)..as I already even own the dress to match, it must be fate, 70s palm mug you will be mine: 

Palmeral Mug, in white/green, from House of Hackney, price £20

Have you started yours yet?

Christmas. It is finally near. In my day job we've been doing it for months. Gifts guides, themed present ideas, colour schemes, Christmas trees, holly, baubles, festive, merriness, elves...you get the point. 

Feeling festive/sweaty - taken on one of the hottest days in July

Every year I joke that despite having yuletide top of my mind since July (I'm being optimistic...it's more like May really) like everyone else I fail to do vast amounts of my present shopping until Christmas Eve. Which is usually true. Can't see the wood for the trees as they say...or y'know pineneedles for the artfully draped pine branches...or something.

So this year I'm going to do something different. I'm not just going to buy early, I'm going to buy with a plan. And to top it all this year I *might* just not max my credit card. 

The answer my friends is: (no one at all will be surprised to hear) mugs!

Yes for Christmas 2013 my friends, family, boyfriend, cat (that's going to be a hard one), godson, secret santa, real santa and anyone else is going to get a MUG. 

As I've inadvertently been researching this all year with my Mondays are for Mugs posts this Christmas should be a doddle. Famous last words if I ever uttered them. Here goes nothing.

The Perfect Tea Towel: Darling Clementine

Darling Clementine is such a simply sweet brand whose charming illustrated designs stem from stationery originally (like these - love!). 

But I'm pleased to say they've also they've turned their patterned graphics to perfect tea towels. And bloody lovely they are too:

Ikonik Tea Towels, set of 2 for $30

Mondays are for Mugs: Batman Mug

I know I've totally missed the Hallowe'en boat (which sounds like a vessel you really wouldn't want to sail on) but I couldn't resist this Batman Mug from Urban Outfitters all the same. 

Cos y'know bats are for life and not just for Hallowe'en

Batman Mug, from Urban Outfitters, price £15

Moving house: Bookends

As today was blookclub day, I thought I'd have a search for beautiful bookends to prop up future blookclub reads in my new home (of unrealistic expectations). 

So here you go.

FAVES:

Colour Block Bookends, from Present & Correct, price £27.50

Brass Swan Bookends, from Timber and Twine on Etsy, price £21.81

Reading Fox Bookends, from Design Atelier Article on Etsy, price £33.46

Ravens Bookends, from Abigail Ahern, price £45

Pair of Aubock Bookends, from Everyday Needs, price $595 NZL (if you are feeling a bit flush...)

Anorak sample sale haul

I think it's fair to say I'm a happy girl with these little buys:

All from today's Anorak rummage sale in Dulwich, South London. 

The sale was packed full of cut price Kissing Animal print products and plenty of bargain hunters rushing in to get their Anorak samples. A humble pot plant even got broken in the excitement. I got my mitts on these lovelies, and *may* have started a bit of Christmas shopping too (I know, this is a horribly early for me, honest). 

I must say I bloody love a good sample sale. Still, shame about the pot plant...

New shop: Mason & Painter

Introducing a new shop that will make your heart sing...Mason & Painter

This new store combines the strong bold typography and graphic prints of Michelle Mason with her business partner's (he's Painter natch) take on beautifully restored vintage pieces. 

And where else could it be? East London's Columbia Road of course. Perfect. It's just opened so make sure to check out this ideal location of pressies or original home pieces.

Here are some snaps from last night's launch party (scuse fuzziness - I blame the photographer...)

  

 And the lovely Michelle!

Mason & Painter, 136 Columbia Road, E2 7RG