Gorgeous green...

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A certain very close acquaintance of mine loves the colour green...and over the coming weeks/months this person is contemplating moving to a new home.

Personally, I've always considered green to be a difficult colour with which to decorate. But to prove myself wrong and to give E some ideas for envisioning a new space, I've spent some time this afternoon hunting for green inspiration.

I found that I tended to be drawn to fairly neutral spaces where green is used as an accent either with furniture or tile etc...

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(E - I thought you'd be interested in the final two images... The sofas are a darker shade of teal than yours, but I thought the open space, white kitchen, floor colour and mixing in of the occasional piece of dark furniture would be of interest...)

I was somewhat inspired to see how much more versatile green was as a colour base than I had anticipated. I think the biggest issue is the large variance in shades of green available and ensuring a cohesive palette.

Anyone else love green?

 

Oxford excursion...and other random items...

I work in a not terribly salubrious part of London (in fact it is the second most socio-economically deprived area in the whole of England). Very occasionally however, my job affords me the opportunity to visit much more picturesque parts of the country.

Last Wednesday I drove up to Oxford for a meeting at the University. With the sun threatening to break through I took a more meandering route through the town on my way back from the meeting in Jericho to the car to enjoy the very beautiful and quintessential architecture.

It was a lovely escape from the grittiness of London's East End...

And in other news...

• the flat buying saga continues - I'm still in limbo, now waiting until the building survey can be completed, which isn't for another few weeks. Complicating this fact is that I will be out of the country for a month when this is happening, so proceeding thereafter to a point where we can exchange contracts is going to be further delayed...
• in ten day's time I'm leaving the UK for a month to undertake another travel fellowship - this time to Australia and the US. With the saga around the flat purchase, trying to start to pack, and work itself being busy, I'm feeling very unprepared for my departure...
• one of the new dresses from the capsule wardrobe had its successful debut at work this week...in fact I was delighted to have my last post commented on by Jennifer Scott (author of The Daily Connoisseur and Lessons from Madame Chic) - to begin with I was flummoxed as to why the traffic to my blog had increased ten-fold...but it all made sense when I saw Jennifer's link..
• and finally, I have this to look forward to this evening:

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Yes, season four of Downton Abbey is indeed returning to UK screens tonight...no longer an Edwardian drama, we're embarking on the jazz age...

On personal style...sewing a capsule wardrobe...

Over the past 18 months or so, I've been working on trying to build a capsule wardrobe...or more accurately, cull the items that I don't wear to reduce to a capsule wardrobe.

My initial inspiration came from reading Jennifer Scott's (from the Daily Connoisseur blog) book Lessons from Madame Chic which described her experiences during the year she lived in Paris. Whilst I'm not sure I will ever be able to reduce my wardrobe volume to that utilised by Madamce Chic, it did make me start thinking about what the core elements of mine should be.

Over recent months I've had some revelations about what constitutes my personal style...perhaps it is a reflection of getting older, but I'm more readily able to identify what suits both my shape and my style. It is actually quite liberating to realise which fashion styles do not suit me and focus on those that do. It certainly made reviewing my current wardrobe a much easier task. I was easily able to identify those less than useful purchases - often those I had made in an attempt to introduce colour or styles that were fashionable, but did not in fact much suit me or my lifestyle.

The one concern I did have was that most of my wardrobe is neutral (black, grey, navy, camel etc)...I'm drawn to brighter colours, but my attempts at introducing them were never long lived.

So, I've recently taken a different approach. I culled the colour 'mistakes' from my cupboard. Then, I took one of my favourite work dresses (a navy a-line knee length shift dress from Hobbs) and used it as a pattern to make myself some new options. Firstly, a lovely soft green in a fine weight fabric that will be perfect for work...

It is undeniably a 'colour', but is soft and subtle enough that I think I'll wear it quite regularly in rotation.

And then, using up more of my fabric stash I made a second version in a bright cornflower blue...

...which I think will be perfect for my time in Sydney in January...

Given the adage that we wear 20% of a wardrobe 80% of the time, I'm hoping that replicating a favourite style in other fabric/weight options will mean that I'm increasing that 20% a little...

And, now that this task is complete, I can now get on with starting to pack up my household non-essentials in anticipation that I may hear in the next week or so about confirming my flat purchase...

On housing limbo...

Architectural details of my possible future home

Sometimes I really do not enjoy being a grown-up....this whole process of trying to buy a house is an exercise in perseverance!

At this point I'm in limbo. I've had an offer accepted, and I've paid a holding deposit to have it taken off the market and stop it being shown to potential other purchasers. And now, I wait....and wait.

Firstly, I have to wait to hear from the bank that I can proceed with a mortgage (this despite going through a huge rigmarole with them less than a month ago in order to get my pre-approval in place). They have promised my mortgage advisor that they will give an answer by the middle of next week.

Then I wait for the mortgage valuation/survey...which can apparently take 5-7 days to arrange. And hope that the surveyor values the property at the same level as my offer...

And then I still wait to hear how long the conveyancing process will take.

Of course, it is all complicated by the fact that in a few weeks I'm leaving the UK for a month to undertake a travel fellowship - so providing that the next few weeks progress smoothly, I will then still have to try and arrange exchange/completion/tenancy notice/moving etc around my travel dates.

It certainly takes the gloss off the excitement of buying a home....sigh...