Sunday 30 June 2013

Midsummer maternity wear.

I follow a few different blogs and my reading tastes could be considered a tad eccentric as I enjoy food blogs, art blogs and lifestyle blogs.  Recently I've enjoyed a few posts about summer clothes, this one from Domestic Sluttery is lovely.

However, considering my current ever expanding planet likeness all the featured dresses would be a bit impractical.  Thankfully I've been lucky enough to find and in a couple of cases been given maternity dresses to stop me from melting in jeans or looking absolutely blimp like in my pre-pregancy wardrobe. (Although I am still wearing a select few items from this...)  My first maternity dress came from a company called Dotty Miss which is run by a friend of mine.
It's a lovely vintage style dress in a size 14 with a pretty pattern on and pockets on the sides.  Technically it hasn't been designed as a maternity dress but it has the room for me to carry on growing into it for the rest of the summer.

Sadly, for public decency/ hygiene reasons I couldn't just wear this dress all summer so I relented and bought myself a maternity dress from H&M for my recent jaunt around London and for dancing in.  I tried on a red dress as I normally love red but the block of colour didn't really do anything for me, then I tried this nice blue and white patterned dress that reminded me of china tea cups.
MAMA Dress

MAMA Dress - from H&M

http://www.hm.com/gb/s/05B4JD
This is me in the dress at How Does it Feel to be Loved.

The picture is courtesy of my friend Heather and obviously I made a few different hairstyle, make up, pose and accessory decisions to the model above.  It's a nice dress though and perfect for a summers day or an evening dancing.  

I've also been lucky enough to get a nice new maternity dress from Paul's sister Gemma for my birthday, which I wore on the day when I went for afternoon tea with my Mum. We then went shopping and my Mum bought me another lovely dress from the Red Herring maternity range in Debenhams Last time I looked in Debenhams there were hardly any maternity dresses and most were navy blue which wasn't what I wanted; however, this time there was a selection.  I tried on 3 dresses in the end although about 5 caught my eye and I took home the one that suited me best.  The moral of this story? Don't over look somewhere if it doesn't have something you fancy the first time you go in it might surprise you in the future! (I'll be popping pictures of these dresses up as soon as I get Paul to take a picture of me in them as they don't appear to be on the website...)

I hope this helps some other people in my boat looking for something nice to wear whilst no longer having a waist this summer.  There are still clothes out there for us! Sadly there aren't many but we won't be wearing maternity clothes forever so we just need a few things to wear in the sun/ imaginary heat that we feel when everyone else is freezing and the skies are overcast.

Tuesday 4 June 2013

Tea based exploration.



When I was out and about the other month I picked up a leaflet for a Yorkshire Tea Trail and as I'm partial to a nice cup of tea I put the leaflet in my bag for further inspection. 


On looking at the trail it became apparent there were a lot of places that I hadn't been for a cuppa but also that Sheffield and Huddersfield were completely overlooked.

I think it would be a fun challenge to take on this tea trail but I also think that it may be necessary to create my own tea trail for nice places to have a cuppa in Yorkshire and Derbyshire which haven't made the list. Anyone have any suggestions about where I should start?