Christmas at home

This year was the first time my husband and I have had our own flat to decorate for Christmas. I enthusiastically believed that I would make every decoration myself and have the perfect homemade home but as December edged nearer and life got busier I realised that this was ever more unlikely!

However through my browsing on Pinterest of homemade Christmas decs I stumbled upon this tutorial for felting baubles and here are the results. I'm now in favour of attempting one homemade decoration each year and gradually building up the collection!

However, my husband thinks that our alternative tree looks evil and would more at home on Nightmare Before Christmas and so we have a more traditional one too:

getting back into photography: Autumn gold

It's been a while since I last blogged and I have now moved cities, started a new job and got married! I'm living in London working in the creative services team of a development NGO.

For those of you new to my blog, I love trying my hand at all sorts of creative ventures, from gig and travel photography, to filmaking, sewing and graphic design.

This weekend was the first chance I had to get out and about with my camera in London and these were taken on my way to Sainsburys for the weekly shop. Despite living in the city we're lucky to have a big common on our doorstep and the light on Sunday showed it off to it's best.

Another new addition to my life is Adobe's Lightroom editing software which I hope will add that je ne sais quoi to my photos but I am still learning. Here are the results...

Goodbye Durham

This is my second farewell blog post of the week (for my work one follow this link).

Today was my last day living in Durham and the sun was shining which makes the city look beautiful so it was a good day to have off work to enjoy wandering around the cobbled street, listening to buskers and bumping into friends.

Unfortunately I forgot to take my camera into town but I did get some snaps of the rest of the day. This is how I spent my last day in Durham:

          A delicious summer lunch with birthday chutney eaten in the sunshine          

Packing up all my remaining possessions ready to be shipped down south

Re-potting lavender plants on the patio

Watering the seedlings on my windowsill that my house mates are going to babysit for me

Making home-baked cookies as a goodbye present

Goodbye Durham! I will miss you and your inhabitants but I will be back to visit often and friends are always welcome in London.

a beautiful little girl

I've had my 50mm lens for a few weeks now and since getting it I've been doing a little flurry of portrait photography. I think it helps that compared to my other lens (28-135mm) this one is positively dinky and so it's much less awkward pointing it in people's faces! Although I think when you're the age of this little girl then you probably don't mind too much either way.

These photos were taken last weekend when my fiancé and I travelled just outside Durham to visit his sister and family. Last time we got to see them his niece was just a week old so it's been great getting to know her a bit more now she's smiling and interacting with people more.

 Baby photography is a completely new thing for me but it is a real privilege to be able to capture some special family moments and I really enjoyed it. I'm looking forward to seeing our little niece grow up and I can promise to do my duty as a doting aunty and take many more photos to come as she gets older...

this is to invite you to....

I mentioned in a previous blog that I've been spending a lot of my spare time planning a wedding and here is a chance to see some of what I've been up to!

Seeing as we've now given out all our invites there doesn't seem to be any need to keep it a secret any more!

I was inspired by browsing other wedding invites on Pinterest but we wanted to have something that was still unique to us.

Jonny (my fiance) and I came up with design ideas together which included a hand-drawn tree, map and swirly branches.

The tree on the invitation section is based on a necklace that Jonny gave me when he proposed and the leaves were painstakingly coloured in by hand to have a more authentic gold look that was tricky to achieve with a printer!

The fabric used to tie up the invites is the same material my mum and aunt are using to make our ushers' waistcoats. And the green colour is a fairly close match to the material of the bridesmaid's dresses.

The ivory and walnut coloured card came from a great company I discovered called Eco Craft who produce high quality recycled card and paper. And we also got our labels and envelopes from them too!

Putting the invites together was definitely a team effort and at one point Jonny, me, my two brothers, my mum and my cousin Sorren were all involved in cutting fabric, tying bows, filling in John Lewis cards, colouring in leaves, writing envelopes etc! 

 

My brother Simon refused to look at any design ideas because he wanted the final result to be a surprise! So he was the first to receive an invite meaning we could then get him to help us make the rest!

A venture into portrait photography...

It was my birthday last weekend and very excitingly I got a new camera lens for my Canon 450D! I got my camera about three years ago and have been working with the 28-135mm lens ever since so it's great to be able to add a bit of variety with a lovely 50mm portrait one. 

As you can see I wasted no time in asking my friends to pose for me:

As you can see it's such a lovely lens to use for portraits and I'm looking forward to getting more into 'people' photography.

Here's a final pic to make you smile. It's my friend Tom with a fish piñata on his head:

blogging again

I know that it's been very quiet on the old blog front for a while and I'm sorry not to have been around. One of the main reasons for this is that currently most of my creative energies are going into wedding plans and I don't want to give away too many surprises in advance!

However, one exciting that happened is that a friend of mine asked me if I would be happy to go out with her and her husband and take some pictures with them. They never got the chance to do an engagement photo-shoot before their wedding and so now, three years into marriage, it was a nice thing to do! 

I was very flattered to be asked, particularly as my friend is a professional photographer and so her standards are pretty high! I was a bit nervous but got relaxed into it and she relaxed into being in front of the camera for a change! If you'd like to see the photos I took just pop along to her blog.

She also took some photos of my fiancé and I around  Durham and you can find these pictures on her website too but here's one of my favourites.

I hopefully won't disappear for too long again this time...