Thursday 8 July 2010

The Haul

Thanks to our lovely, generous guests, not only could we afford to go and stay in a fabulous b&b in Brighton but we also had enough money to do some serious shopping. Our flat, although we've lived in it for over six months now, is still looking a little bare, so the first thing we bought was a ton of artwork, wrapping paper to put in frames and postcards.

One of the things I was most excited about was being able to have a right good rummage through all the flea markets - we don't have anything like that in Portsmouth; the closest we've got is charity shops and old furniture shops that sell sofas with holes in and scratched filing cabinets. As you can imagine, I was in my element in shops that were crammed with shelves jostling with 1970's tableclothes, 50's china and old tin boxes. So much so, that we ended up buying so much that once we got home, the Husband had to put a new shelf up in the lounge to hold it all!

Flea markets well and truly rummaged, the next places I stumbled across that made my pulse really race were two fabric shops nestling in the North Laines. One was called Ditto Fabrics, and offered such patterns and prints that I've only ever dreamed of finding. Retro print hearts! The eiffel tower! A metre of seventies style floral cotton for just £3.99! I was a happy Mrs indeed. The other one was an utter fabric chaos - a veritable maze of materials (none were really to my taste, I'm a bit picky when it comes to fabric quality...) and a cabinet bursting with buttons - I could have happily spent a good hour just picking out buttons, but I had the Husband to think of, so I gathered a good handful and we set off again.

While we were wandering around, we decided we had to buy presents for people, so we came up with wonderful jams for the parents (and a Beano mug for my Dad and a bag of yummy fudge for my Mum), and a lovely wooden, eco-friendly, sustainably-made scooter for the Boy. I have a real thing for wooden toys - they satisfy the traditionalist and the love of eco-friendly in me, as well as being more hard wearing and durable than plastic. The Boy has a LOT of plastic toys, as the lovely wooden ones come at rather a high price, but if money were no object... well, there'd be no garish plastic in his toy box! When we presented it to him after arriving home, he ran towards it excitedly, stood on it and...... waited. Obviously he thought that simply standing on it would make it glide across the room! Fun times ahead with that scooter indeed....

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