Baltic Cruise – cottage creeping in Stockholm

Do you ever feel so tired after a holiday that the last thing you want to do is relive it all over again? Don’t get me wrong, I love travelling, but I have a rather short expiry date and after about 5 days away, I start to get home sick. I love getting home and back to my normal routine after a holiday and sometimes the last thing I want to do is go through all our photos out of pure exhaustion. Case in point – we’ve been home from our holidays for 3 weeks and I’m only going through our pictures now. I know. Bad blogger. I’m hanging my head in shame. But enough time has passed that I’m able to fully appreciate and relive our holiday all over again. Is this a weird thing? Just me? Okay. 

Anyways. Hubster and I went on a Baltic Cruise and it had its moments where our minds were blown. We flew from Dublin directly to Stockholm and while we spent a pretty poor amount of time in Stockholm itself [zomg. must. go. back], we did get one hell of a view of the Swedish countryside. We had been on a cruise before so we knew once we got on the ship to book a table in the formal restaurant asap. We were polite and funny, batted our eyelashes and crooked fringes, and I plucked up enough courage to ask if we could have a table with a nice view … 

The cruise ship began departing Frihamnsgatan port in Stockholm just as we were sitting down to dinner, and to say we got the best seat in the house on the ship was the understatement of our cruise. We were sitting facing a huge set of windows and THIS WAS OUR VIEW. I still can’t get my head around it. It made for most excellent and optimal cottage creeping … 

I want to go to there. So badly. I was amazed by how much this part of Sweden reminded me of where I grew up in Canada which was aptly called, Cottage Country. It stole my heart. And to give you an idea of what it was like through the medium of fancy moving pictures …

It was so romantic I could have vommed. But that would have been a waste because our dinner was intensely yummy. I ate all of the seafood in case you guys were curious. And we of course had too much wine but that’s what holidays are for, right?

You guys, it really blew our minds and we soaked up every minute of it. I know I don’t have any photos of Stockholm itself, but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to share these bad boys. I think you will agree they are pretty sweet [side note: I am so pleased I invested in a new lens before we left. It upped my zoomage-creeping skills].

I’ll be sharing pictures from each of our cruise destinations over the next couple of weeks so stay tuned for bigger and bolder photos of the other cities we visited. But Sweden, we will definitely be back. You are far too pretteh.

StockholmHelsinki St. PetersburgTallinnRiga

Work hard, play harder

I’m going to try my best to write this blog post without sounding like a whiny little jerk. 

The last couple weeks have been insane. I haven’t had a day off in 4 weeks. I’ve crammed as much as physically possible into each day, working until 20:00 every night followed by more work at home. I haven’t sat down and had dinner with my husband in at least 2 weeks. No, that’s a lie. We had dinner together last week, but I fell asleep before I finished eating. At the table. Like a toddler. I wish I could say I was making that up. 

The awesome things that happened are – I submitted a couple of articles for Image Interiors & Living magazine, styled an opener picture for Image Interiors & Living with an incredible woman whose encouragement and opportunities makes me want to cry into my laptop, I branched out into the world of online shopping {more on that soon}, got to work with two beyond incredible people and #PicadoMexican is now almost complete {ZOMG}, and last but not least I became an aunt for the second time last weekend to a 9.2lbs tank of a nephew that can already hold his head up. Definitely some form of survival instinct has kicked in and I’m choosing to only focus on the good that has happened these past few weeks. 

And what I’ve been working towards? As and from Sunday morning, husband and I are cruising our way through the Baltic Sea. No, seriously. Stockholm, Helsinki, St. Petersburg {hello second honeymoon!}, Riga and Tallinn. One week of heaven and {cover your ears} I cannot fucking wait

Blogtacular 2014

Last weekend was incredibly surreal, encouraging, uplifting, energizing and dangerously inspiring. I took a mini trip to London to attend the first ever Blogtacular and there are no words for how awesome it was.  

When I first heard of it I got in contact with co-blogger and co-handmade-hag Maria about attending Blogtacular along with me. Before long, we had our travel and hotel booked, bags packed, and I was about to meet her in our London hotel lobby. I should explain – we’ve never met before, but have spent years following and inappropriately commenting on each others blogs. So I had a “wait, is she a real person?” moment. What if she’s a 45-year-old man who’s about to murder me with a hammer in the hotel bathroom? Turns out Maria is a real person, and a painfully lovely, quirky, hilarious and easy going person at that, who didn’t resemble a serial killer in any way! Phew. 

Armed with my notepad,  {slightly cringe} Hydrangea Girl necklace and ‘business’ cards

^ KEYNOTE ADDRESS with Joy Cho of Oh Joy!
Friday night started with a bang with a keynote address from the amazing Joy Cho. I foresee I’ll be saying this a lot in this post, but there are no words for how inspiring it was. Joy had incredible advice and some serious one-liners to add volumes to your self esteem. I was too giddy / starstruck / fangirling and unfortunately didn’t take any notes, but there’s good news – her presentation will be available online soon is now available for all to see and hear and be inspired! It is well worth the watch, people. 

^ ON VALUE with Anne Ditmeyer of Pret a Voyager

I then attended Anne’s presentation on value. She spoke about her experiences, struggles, achievements, dreams, the opportunities that she’s been offered, and importantly, how to ask to get paid for your work when companies chance their arm at not mentioning money. A small few points of hers that resonated strongly with me were – 

– Do the kind of work you want to be known for
– Learn to use limitations as opportunities to get creative
– Quality work takes time. Work with clients who will respect your work and your time
– Lawyers, doctors and plumbers don’t work for free, so why should you?

^ FROM BLOG TO BOOK with Tilly Walnes of Tilly and the Buttons and Vicky Orchard of Kyle Books

Next I sat in on Tilly and Vicky’s chat about going from blog to book. Setting aside the sleepless nights, going unshowered for weeks, contract stings, and red flags it takes to make a book, they focused on the positives as to how it’s easier for a blogger to take that step from screen to print – 

– Bloggers already have a built audience
– They’ve established an illustrative and visual identity for ourselves through our blog already
– They already have a good understanding and eye for typography
– And more importantly, bloggers are good at dealing with and meeting deadlines, and practice discipline

Some serious inspiration to get me day dreaming about having my own home DIY book! Hah.

^ HANDS ON STYLING with Ellie Tennant  

Maria and I then attended Ellie Tennants session on styling. I found it to be an exciting presentation and it gave us loads of inside tips and tricks for designing in front of the lens. A few key notes were –

– Be conscious of where the sun is and never use artificial lighting. Use light reflectors for dark spots in stead
– Add depth with layers. Three layers is best – background, middle, and foreground
– Less is more. Be ruthless and get rid of uneccessary items
– Practice wabi-sabi: the art of imperfection. If everything looks too perfect, it will look fake

After Ellie’s encouraging presentation, we all took turns styling a small set up based around hoards of beautiful props. Maria and I styled the above picture which perfectly collides my love of stripes with Maria’s dinki dots. And a perfect addition of wabi-sabi – one ‘fallen’ petal.  
CLOSING KEYNOTE with Natalie Lue of Baggage Reclaim 

Natalie spoke at the end of the day, and even though energy levels were starting to deflate, she grabbed our attention, picked us up and finished Blogtacular on a high note. Some of Natalie’s encouraging one liners –

– If you try to please everyone, you will no longer be differentiating yourself from others
– You will have more ideas than time. This is okay
– When we compare ourself with others, we forget who we are. Go easy on yourself. This is your journey
– Dreams don’t work if you don’t

I couldn’t resist picking up a copy of Ellie’s new book, Design Bloggers at Home and Joy’s book, Blog, Inc., followed quickly by dorking out and asked for their autographs. I’m always so torn in such situations – on one hand I don’t want to bother them with something as silly as an autograph, but on the other, it takes all of 30 seconds of their time for something I’ll have on my shelf forever. So I fan-girled big time at both ladies and stole away with their signatures. 

It’s been four days since Blogtacular wrapped up on Saturday evening, and I’m still feeling inspired and energized about all the information, tips and tricks I took from it. That’s how you know it was good. I can’t wait to rewrite all my notes in proper penmanship in my notebook, and more importantly, put them into practice.

Thank you Kat and Kat. It was a spectrum of awesome.