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 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:

(recycled) birthday cushion!

It was one of my oldest and best friend's birthday at the weekend and so I really wanted to make her something special as a present. I've had several spare cushions kicking around recently so that seemed an good thing to make. And I also had a silk top that I'd bought from a charity shop years ago because I loved the fabric, but I'd never worn it. It made for a really luxurious cover though and as the top was lined I had the perfect backing material too!

I wanted to avoid having any seams in the fabric so it was a bit of a stretch to make the cover big enough. It was slightly on the small side but the bonus of that is a plumper cushion in the end! I also used the original zip from the top which was only half the length that I'd normally use but as the colour was a perfect match I hope that's not too noticeable.

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Happy Birthday Geri! I hope that you enjoy your cushion :-) x