Talon-tastic Thursday: New Barry Ms fail to impress

This has been a bad week for me where nail varnish is concerned, I'm afraid. The three Barry M colours I excitedly picked up in Topshop on Monday evening are all epic fails: one is the wrong flipping colour altogether (Black, I'd meant to pick up Racing Green), and the glitter pieces in another (Lavender Hexagonals) are too sparse to replicate anything like the look of the polish in the bottle. The last member of this sad little triumvirate is Neon Pink, which as Babaduck quite rightly suggested, is seriously channeling Constance Carroll with its opalescent blue flash.

It's beyond gross.

To take my mind off all that disappointment, I'm busy planning what to do with my nails this weekend. Himself's uncle's retirement do is tomorrow night, and his sister's 18th is on Saturday, so it'll be all go! At the minute, I'm leaning towards a sophis nude or French Shellac mani for the retirement gig, and then an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink glitter leopard print with rhinestones number atop that for the 18th.

Deadly nailz are a surefire way of ensuring that I can be all down with the kids and shizz, yo.

Pelmet Me Entertain You.

Our rented flah here in London has Venetian blinds on all the windows, which I do not love. The day we moved in, I treated myself to a three-pack of interiors magazines (£6 for the lot in Tesco!) and one of the spreads had a photo of a simple rectangular box pelmet covered in purple fabric which was hung as an accompaniment to a Venetian blind.

I instantly thought it'd be a great way to jazz up the blinds here, but the fact that rawlplugs (and therefore big eff off holes in the rented wall) would be required to hang such window dressings meant that it looked like a no go.

A little bit of obsessive Googling, though, turned up an ingenious solution that I fully intend to utilise myself. Jenny at Little Green Notebook used foam board instead of MDF for the DIY box pelmets she made for her daughters' bedroom. You'll find it in art supply shops (my local has sheets of it of varying thickness) and it's so light that tape alone can hold the pieces together. No glue or screws required.

Being super light means pelmets made from foam board would be brilliant for renters since a couple of small nails - or even Velcro tabs or Command strips - should be all it'll take to hang the suckers up.

I feel a project coming on...

Talon-tastic Thursday is a bit AWOL.

Apparently Virgin can't come to hook us up to telly and broadband any sooner than the 5th February (!), so for now I'm relying on Himself's iPad for all my blogging needs.

That means I can't, unfortunately, show you any of the manicures I've been sporting since moving to London: a black glitter gradient mani, fuchsia nails covered in rows of little white hearts, a teal creme paint job, and a grey with black half-moons at the base that I came up with one especially homesick day when the skies and buildings and footpaths here became one big concrete-coloured blur.

Anyway. Hopefully I can figure out a photo fix over the weekend and things can get back to being a little bit less all over the place shortly, but in the meantime did you know that my Marc Jacobs nails are now a little bit famous? Sophy Robson was kind enough to feature them on her blog (I had a lovely email from her on my birthday that absolutely made my day) as were WAH Nails, who had me blushing with all the nice things they had to say about me.

Thanks, you guys!

By the way, hello and welcome to my new followers - er, I promise that there are a lot more nail posts around here when I'm not in the middle of moving my life to another country ;)

Interior inspiration: Stand-alone shoe cabinets.

Yes, yes, I should be packing. Thanks, ma. Instead, I'm thinking that THIS is definitely how shoes should be stored.

{image source: This is Glamorous via Apartment 132}



{image source: Shoe Daydreams via Apartment Therapy}



{image source: LivingEtc}

I'm *very* hopeful that I'll be able to work some similarly grand shoe storage solutions into our new apartment flat in London. I have these mad notions about how I'll just happen across gorgeous antique or vintage or just generally amazeballs pieces of furniture, possibly for free or else completely dirt cheap, in the big English smoke.

Like a set of gently used Eames Eiffel chairs for a fiver in a charity shop or a beautiful ornate bed frame in a skip begging me to take it home. You know the sort of thing.

I'm quietly confident that a glass-fronted display cabinet, ideal for shoe display purposes, will fortuitously come into my life in the same way once we get over there. 

Moving meanderings.

Happy New Year, everyone! Hopefully normal service here will resume next week but for now I am drowning in moving boxes and bubble wrap and brown packing tape.

Suffice to say, the packing is *not* going well. Himself started work in London on Tuesday so I was home alone for the week, which I thought would mean I'd get loads done.

It mostly just meant I couldn't watch any of my usual crime/murder/vampire telly shows because I'd be awake all night in a cold sweat waiting to hear a step on the stairs or the feel of a blade on my throat or a sudden chill in my bedroom.

So far, I've half-packed one box with what I'm calling "decorative accents" (so, er, candleholders and vases, then.)


Subscibe to the blog or Puppeh gets it.

I did also manage to fill two boxes with clothes and shoes and stuff for the charity shop, which was actually a real achievement for a world-class ditherer. Bloody lucky that my hits-once-every-five-years purging humour coincided with having to pack up almost every stick and stitch that we own.

Mam is in a very bad way about The Impending Move; not even trotting out the line that she'll have free B&B half an hour from Oxford Street could cheer her up today. 

Telling her it's a good job that it's only me who's moving and not my sister Lisa because she'd have to be hospitalised for that seemed to remind her to be thankful for small mercies, though!