A touch of autumn

Not gonna lie, this is not my favourite time of the year. Especially when October has presented itself like the past three weeks, heavily overcast and icy cold.
Then finally a change of weather a couple of days ago and suddenly atumn became a tinsy bit bearable after all. It's still not like I love it or anything but....

Parts of my local neighbourhood looks a bit like the English countryside, which I don't mind one bit.

Remember the good old days when ericas could only be found in two shades...? 

Enjoy the rest of your autumn and happy Halloween to those of you who celebrate that!

A few more decoupaging projects

After all I couldn't stop after just two projects! It's just so damn nifty. I also had another one of these boring old flower pots. And with my granmother's birthday coming up and you KNOW how difficult it is to find them a present at a certain age... you get the drift. 

First thing is to paint the pot with a pale lilac colour that would match the napkins I've chosen. 

Then after applying the pattern, leave it to dry before filing off the excess paper.

And there it is. after a finish coat of varnish. I went for the semi glossy varnish this time which I think looked much better on the flower pot. I've also grown quite fond of using the hemp string, makes things a bit more rustic.

The fake flowers I just put in there for the sake of the picture - I went to the florist and bought a cute triple-coloured erica and had them wrap everything in cellophane. The didn't mind a bit that I had brought my own flower pot, in fact they were quite complimentary at the shop! :)

So my previous two projects have been gifts and since I basically have a cupboard filled with flower pots and some of them are quite boring, I figured that I'd decorate a few for myself as well! 

I got this little tray with three mini pots I got a while back. It's got the brightest green colour with I must have at one point thought was cool but now I'm wondering what the hell I was thinking... 

Painting a metallic surface wasn't the easiest in the world but after three coats I got a decent finish. I was going to put napkins on top after all. But I was quite happy with the result and was actually contemplating just keeping them like this - un-decoupaged, as it were. 

I painted the tray and one of the pots white, one pot pale blue and the third pot pale lilac (as the project above). The coloured paint is matt furniture paint, and I actually used blue acryllic paint to acheive the pale blue colour. The white paint is actually wall paint! I had a bit left over from touching up my living room ;) If that makes me sound a bit slapdash, that's probably correct... 

Anyway, I'm very happy that I decided to decoupage the pots in the end, because I'm very happy with the result. The point of decoupaging is making stuff look like something you can't just buy in your everyday shop, in my opinion.

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And the completed project happily sitting in my kitchen window with new plants. Question is of course how long the plants will survive before they will be all munched up by a certain furbball....
But hey, at least the pots are nice!

My favourite place...

So last month I went back to Marbella (as in Costa del Sol, Andalucìa, Southern Spain). a place I've been going to about ten times since I was 15. Marbella and its port Puerto Banùs are known to be a jetset place where rich people parade their expensive cars back and forth to their even more expensive villas and yachts.
Due to its close location to the Gibraltar and Morocco, the area has also one of the highest crime rates in Europe as it's a popular place for smugling of drugs to and from Africa. So with all these rich snobs and criminals about, what makes us return to Marbella again and again?

The mountains and the sea and the lush parks and gardens....

Puerto Banùs looks like a quaint little fishing village and it's got a lovely little beach bar called Tramps where the owner always greets us as old friends.

 The same does Pedro, the owner of Marbella Patio. We've celebrated numerous birthdays in that place and Pedro is always up for the challenge no matter how big the company.

And then there's the Old Town and the Orange Square where sitting there as the sun sets makes you not want to be anywhere else in the entire world.

And that's it, really.... :)