Our Day by Design

M E R R Y   C H R I S T M A S I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas or festive season with your loved ones!

With only 3 days until Christmas, I wanted to show you how we made our flat look festive! We put up our tree, got out all of our decorations and displayed all the new ones we bought in Cologne. Along with the tree we also have the ornament tree I added last year, which I use to display some of my favourites. As usual we totally underestimated the time it would take to put the tree up, string all the different lights around it along with all the garlands and that was before we even started on the decorations!   Again this year we had quite a few {I think there are 11} new additions to the trees, collected throughout the year on our travels. They include a gold metal star from Bratislava; a painted glass bauble from Vienna; a wooden ornament from Marrakech; a red metal star from Bakewell; a beaded ornament I made myself {the second pic below}; a glass tree which was a gift from a friend and quite a few we bought in Cologne in November. They were two red tin San...

We have finally made some progress on the nursery! As you may have seen from some of my nursery pins , we loved the idea of painting grey stripes on one wall. The room was still painted magnolia from when we moved in, as you can see below, so Graham started by painting the whole room white and glossing all the woodwork. I then forgot to take a photo of the room before we started the next stage! To find the perfect grey colour we had previously tried a few paint swatches from the Grey Steel & Night Jewels Dulux Tailor Made Colour ranges against the white in our living room. After looking at loads and loads of grey options these were really the only ones which didn't have any hints of blue or green. We then bought a tester of Grey Steel 2 , the 3rd one down in the photo, which we loved when we painted a bit on the white wall, behind our travel map so it wouldn't be seen! Having read a few tutorials online before we started, everyone recommended Frog Tape as t...

Reaching 32+5 weeks means we are down to single figures with less than 8 weeks to go. The baby is the size of a squash (or a jicama, whatever that is). As you can see my bump is still growing a lot! I can still get away with wearing a few normal tops or vests providing they are long enough, otherwise its all maternity clothes. Although I think my bump is quite big I've been told by more than one person this week that they don't think so at all, and since its all out the front it doesn't look too big; one was surprised that I only had 8 weeks to go! Unsurprisingly I haven't managed to take a photo every week since my last update although I did manage one in Cologne at 31 weeks and one on Sunday when I was exactly 32 weeks.   It was my 30th birthday on Saturday so after having a delicious afternoon tea at Mimi's in Edinburgh, my parents had some family and friends round to their house on Sunday for another homemade afternoon tea to cele...

Its my 30th Birthday today! Unlike the last couple of years when we have been in Florida for my birthday, this year we are at home, since we took our last baby free trip to the Christmas markets in Cologne last weekend. This morning we are going round to my parents so we can skype with my sister, brother-in-law and nephew in Oz then we are going to do some shopping before meeting my parents at Mimi's in Leith for afternoon tea. Tomorrow my parents are hosting some of my family and friends at their house for another afternoon tea to celebrate. At almost 32 weeks pregnant, its not exactly how I thought my 30th would be but I'm looking forward to a lovely weekend.

After celebrating an early Christmas in October with my family, the 19th of November brought Christmas in November with my fellow Blogging Six girls;  Conversation Pieces , My Spare Thoughts , Daydreams in Lace , This Girl Is... & A Dizzy Girl . I was bridesmaid dress shopping for my best friends wedding in the morning {being pregnant I just spectated while the other two bridesmaids tried the dresses on} then I met the girls at Coco's before we headed down to Mimi's in Leith for lunch, where we were going to swap our secret santa gifts. The rules for the secret santa were a small bought present and something homemade and I think its safe to say we were all quite nervous about handing over our gifts. However, everyone loved what they had been given and what had been made for them so there was no need for the nerves. You can read some of the other posts the girls have written about our secret santa here , here & here . I had Lisa-Marie  so I bought...