Bloody Mary with extra Tomato Juice

Hi! I hope you all had lovely weekends. Mine was great. I managed to sneak out of work just early enough to go to the charity shops near my house before they closed. I got a good haul too!

Do not adjust your computer screen, this dress really is that scary tomato-red colour! I'm going to shorten this, I might keep the excess fabric to make a head wrap or something because it's just fantastic!

I also got a brown St Michael's skirt, which is quite versatile - pull down low for work, put up above the waist for the pub! And I'm wearing it with a lovely brown and white spot shirt that I bought.

The shirt is a bit over-sized so I'm more likely to wear it under a dress so it's a bit more flattering.

I got this crazy pink dress, it's really good quality thick material, but I'm not sure how much I like it. It wouldn't work being taken up and I just don't think the length is great...I'll give another try in a week or so and see how I feel. I think it would look better with flat shoes and bare legs, wearing my cowboy boots with it kind of clogged it up even more!

I also got a little set of drawers for £4, which for some reason I've deleted the picture of so I'll show you another time.

The Boyfriend and I went out for a meal on Saturday to celebrate our two year anniversary (wow!) and had a great time. Lots of drinking and good food including this bad boy:

I don't like any cheese except melted cheese and this was all warm and runny and good for bread-dipping, mmmm.....

I wore...

...a purple ASOS dress that is one of my fail-safe favourites, a bit boobylicious but that's good! I wore it with a fantastic kimono that I got from a site called Eat Me Vintage. I did say to them I'd do a nice mini-review but to be honest it's really hard to style it with things. I think that's been the case because I've been wearing things with sleeves because of winter, so hopefully I'll be able to style it with more strappy dresses, because it is rather lovely. Also a lovely locket the Boyfriend gave me a while ago and some Rimmel red lippy. I had my hair re-dyed too so I was feeling good!

Last picture now! I wanted to show you my crazy but cool dress that I always throw on when I pop to the shops on a sunny weekend:

I got it last summer from a Rocking Horse charity shop. It's actually quite thick and heavy and it can get weirdly hot to wear! But I think it's really nice and unusual.

I think that's it now! Just to say that I'm feeling very inspired to try to be healthier again after letting things slip the last couple of weeks, thanks to the lovely girls over at 'where are my knees?'

They're doing tips, guest posts, and sharing their goals to try and achieve them with everybody watching!!

Danni x

I'm late! I'm late! For a very important date!

Oops, Wednesday already and I haven't blogged. Shame on me!

I had a great time in Worthing even though I didn't get much joy in the charity shops. I bought a New Look skirt for £4.30 which had such a nice floral pattern and is a good above-knee-but-not-too-short-for-work-length!

My friend Lucy's gorgeous daughter Daisy went on the carousel which was a lovely one...

And my friend Ben made the most amazing Mexican lasagne - tortillas instead of pasta and cheese, sweetcorn and black beans instead of mince - it was amazing! And pina colada ice cream with toasted coconut for pudding. I wish I lived at his house.

Then to a Mad Hatters tea party on Sunday, I wore the new blue dress from my last post along with my mini top hat - still no pictures of the hat to show you unfortunately! Instead here are some crazy-looking red scones...

Today I'm wearing this flamingo dress, along with this gorgeous bracelet that I picked up at the vintage fair the other weekend:

And my new spring coat, which was £20 down from £60 in the Dorothy Perkins sale.

It's such a nice bright colour, and it has a massive hood too, for when the weather is not so spring-like.

Lastly, I thought I'd show you what I wore last night because it's one of my favourite outfits, one of those things you can always fall back on. Apologies for me flashing my cleavage but it's very low-cut (and I flash my cleavage all the time anyway!) It's a sleeveless star dress from French Connection, some of their stuff is too small for me (and all of it is usually too expensive!) but I got this a few years ago in a sale and it's quite stretchy. I love it.

I also did quite heavy make-up, I don't usually do eyeliner under my eyelashes as well, but I think it looked ok, maybe it made me a bit stare-y but oh well! You can also see my pink fake pearl necklace which I got at the vintage fair too:

Danni x

Yippee!

I'm a very happy bunny today. This is because

• It's Friday
• I'm going charity shopping all day tomorrow in a small town outside Brighton
• I got the best dress ever from ebay yesterday

Oh the dress. It's amazing. My ebay purchases are good about 50% of the time; this one's definitely a winner. I don't think I've ever been so content after putting on a dress. No 'if I add a belt it'd look great' or 'when I lose some weight it will work', just instant loveliness!

I love it. I also got another dress which again doesn't need anything doing to it and is just rather lovely:

And then this shirt dress which does need adjusting. I was thinking of cutting the bottom half off and re-attaching it with elastic thread to make a stretchy waistline. I've never sewn with elastic thread but the tutorials make it seem fairly easy. We'll see...

Hopefully I'll have some fab finds to show you after the weekend!

Have a good one everyone,

Danni x

I Heart Sweaters

Hello everyone,

I hope you had a flippin' good Pancake Day yesterday (see what I did there?!) I had a lovely time, being made pancakes by my wonderful friend Jess.

Today I'm wearing the skirt I wore last week but with a very cute sweater, and I think it goes really well. I do love a good sweater, I think that they suit a curvy girls shape as they show off your figure whilst being thick enough to be flattering to your lady lumps! This one's from Primark and I recently bought a bright-pink-with-black-bunnies one from Next via Ebay which I'm hoping to wear soon. I've gone a bit mad on ebay recently but will hopefully have a lovely influx of fab dresses soon. The first one came yesterday and is gorgeous, but needs a wash as it just smells too musty to wear at the moment.
 

Here's a pic of the skirt and sweater:

Cute non?

Lastly here's a link to A Thrifty Mrs' blog for a giveaway she's running; you could win a dress from Hummingbird Vintage (and jewellery!) and they do some lovely stuff. I'll be jealous if any of you win!

Danni x

"You'd be surprised how much it costs to look this cheap!"

I love that Dolly Parton quote!

The reason I used it is because I went to a vintage fair on Sunday, and I just couldn't believe the prices. I've ranted about this before, how shops like Beyond Retro are taking advantage of the vintage obsession and charging extortionate prices for things. The fair itself was lovely, to look around at old furs, hats, jewellery, shoes...but although some people were doing bargain prices on jewellery and £10 sale rails, everything else seemed to start at £30 and go on up!

The charity shops in Brighton aren't as cheap as in smaller towns, and there are no jumble sales to get the dirt cheap prices (although I'm still working on trying to set one up) so if you want to just buy vintage it ends up being very expensive!

Here's the dress I wore to the fair, which I'd found on Friday in my local Oxfam for £7.99, along with a Bacardi cocktail set for £2.99 (that was a price I liked!)

This picture is telling me I need to clean my mirror, it's filthy!

*Random doughnut picture alert*

We bought Krispy Kreme doughnuts on Saturday, look how lovely this one was:

So pretty!

Danni x

Love it or Hate it?

Primark. Do you love it or hate it? Or like me - both! I've had an on/off relationship with Primark for the last year or so. It started when there was uproar about them being really unethical and not paying the workers that made the clothes enough, so I decided to stop shopping in there. Then more recently I did a little research and saw that they were trying to be better, and to be honest a lot of the high street shops are just the same, so I went back. And then there's the fact that - let's face it - it just isn't always great quality, and that can get really frustrating. Even if you're not paying a lot you still want both sides of the dress to be symmetrical and the zips not to break, it's not too much to ask!

Yesterday my friend sent me this article about women falling out of love with Primark. I do hate Liz Jones, she talks utter crap a lot of the time, a great example in this article being the fantastically weird quote: "I was open-mouthed when I asked Laura, 14, whether the playsuit she’d bought would still be in fashion come autumn. ‘Who cares? I might be dead by then,’ she said." I mean, WTF?!

As for the ethical bit, here is a statement from the Ethical Trade Initiative about Primark which shows that they're really trying to change their ways by hiring an Ethical Director.

From the slice of life I can see through blogging Primark doesn’t seem to be less popular, people acknowledge that it isn’t the highest quality but there also seems to be a noticeable improvement in the styles, that they are more similar to high fashion than they used to be. Primark isn’t really a place to be ashamed to shop any more although I do think that more women should be aware of the affects of “fast fashion” and genuinely buy things that they will wear often. Obviously I shop all the time but I’ve always only tried to buy things that I know I will wear, I’ve never bought things just because they’re fashionable. I’ve made a concerted effort lately to shop less, it can be annoying having constant guilt about not being green with your buying but to be honest I think everyone needs a bit of that guilt about things; buying clothes, recycling, dropping litter etc otherwise it doesn’t get better.

Speaking of dropping litter – I personally think that compared to when I was younger places are a lot cleaner, in my (completely un-informed) opinion this is because it was so drilled into our generation that dropping litter is bad that it’s just not done as much, and I can only hope that that is what will happen with our current over-consumption.

The bit of the article I really agreed with was the very last line "...adopt a new mantra for clothes shopping: buy less, love it more."

What do you think?

Danni x

Holey ripped tights Batman!

I know this is a problem for everyone, but aren't ripped tights bloody annoying?! I've had to walk around work all day with bare legs feeling a bit risqué because my tights ripped all the way down the back after a couple of hours. It looks like I got really excited about the sun and had to take my clothes off regardless of the cold. I am excited about the sun, and wouldn't think twice about wearing this skirt with bare legs in the summer, but my legs aren't ready to come out of hibernation yet! I want to just stick to leggings, lovely comfy leggings that don't run, that you don't have to think about at all, but tights just look that little bit nicer (to me). Also with leggings it isn't really a problem to show a bit of bum, whereas with tights you can end up showing too much!

Anyway, tight rant aside, just a quick outfit post today:

With and without my lovely yellow cardi from a charity shop. It creates really bad static electricity, I had to look up "cures" for it this morning; if you rub moisturiser on your body where the clothes touch, then with moisturiser still on your hands put the item back on again and wipe your hands on top of it (obviously don't do this with things that could stain!) then it goes. It actually worked!

You can't see this skirt very well but I got it from New Look recently, £22 down to £8 and it's gorgeous, it flares out a bit and has a cute bow on the pocket.

Accessorised with a wooden necklace (charity shop) and my amber ring.

Danni x