Spot the dog...

Oh my! I was so unbelievably excited when we were asked to send one of our little sleepy dogs over to Australia to possibly be featured in Inside Out a couple of months ago - but until I saw it in print I still thought we'd probably been cut out of the shot or something. But no... here we are in print! Woo hoo. And all in one of our favourite magazines and as I've said I have a bit of a passion for those - this is one I shall be hanging on to for sure! Thanks so much to Lara for asking us and styling such a lovely spread...

Bargain hunting...

As I previously mentioned C and I bought a 1950s (ish) cabinet on a whim the other day so I thought I'd do a wee show and tell here...

Plus today the sun was out and boy has it seemed like ages since I last saw it so I whipped the camera out and got snap happy. The prints are new aquistions - the lovely Dapper Bird print is by Kate Hindley from her great etsy shop and the other by Hazel Nicholls from here is one we've wanted for ages and ages so I treated C for Valentine's Day. I was pleased with myself as it works so well on two levels - 1. the man loves his biscuits and 2. it's a helpful tip!

(Please excuse the mess in the corner and the recently broken chair - we've yet to fully complete the reorganisation process!)

Out of hand...

So we've been a bit busy again with some lovely new stockists and more orders from existing stockists, more on that soon, but today we decided to have a bit of a clear out of the studio. We bought a 1950s cabinet on an ebay whim the other day and now have to find a home for it! It was one of those this-will-be-perfect-if/when-we-ever-get-a-shop-come-studio type of decisions with only 5 mintues to go. Still I love it and am now wondering what to fill it with. Perhaps some of these...

I have to confess I have a bit of a magazine hoarding problem. I must have almost every copy of Elle Dec from 1997 onwards (and now from about 1993 too as I adopted another collection from a friend - much to Cs horror!) also most copies of Living Etc and a whole bunch of World of Interiors from the 1990s. Like I said, it's a problem! Which means everytime we want to move furntiure around we first have to deal with the magazines and as for moving house I daren't speak of it ever again!

I have to add the stack in the bottom photo is 4' high - I measured!

Colours and yet more colours...

We're still thinking lots about colours and have been finding inspiration everywhere but coming to any kind of decision is proving far more difficult than we'd first thought (although to be fair deciding on anything is not my forte as C will happily tell anyone who'll listen). It was 5 weeks before we officially registered Ru with a name and I once got £10 off a pair of shoes just because they wanted me out of the darn shop! Anyway just thought I'd post some images which have been inspiring me colourwise this week...

from design*sponge

from rathernice

from design*sponge

from rathernice

from today I love

from bloesem

Colour me happy...

Here's a little peek of some ink mixing today. We're trying to expand our palette but we keep going round in circles - arf arf! We're beginning to feel a bit defined by our mustard and teal combo, not that we don't still love it, just need to shake it up for Spring... watch this space.

Better late than never?

As promised here are the bits and bobs we produced for some Christmas markets back in December. We left it all far too last minute as usual and didn't even get them done in time to put them up for sale in our Etsy shop! Oops. The last international posting dates seemed to be upon us before we knew it! But I didn't want the photos to go to waste so here they are... better late than never?

Our festive tea towel design...

And cards...

We also printed this little number for Ru for Christmas... and yes I'm still forcing him to wear it in January before it's too small! Poor boy - you can see he's impressed!

A Welsh cow shed...

Well we're back. After a beautiful and surprisingly speedy drive up we arrived at Beudy Banc (welsh for cow shed) or at the bottom of a track which turned out to be a tad steeper and more hair razing than we'd anticipated. Once we'd reached the summit the house did not disappoint - we felt like we were staying in a friend's lovingly decorated home not a holiday let. The attention to detail was amazing and has left us inspired and avidly scouring ebay every night. I think the only new pieces of furniture in the house were the beds! We had a grand old time pretending we lived there for real for a week.

When we did leave the cosy indoors and attempted the steep descent we were blown away (sometimes literally) by the Welsh landscape. Our photos don't really do it justice (the weather was not on our side and we even got cut off when the bridges flooded!) - visit Wales!

NB. The Beudy Banc interior photos are not ours they're from the lovely Beudy Banc flickr page - click here for more.