Oh my goodness I have been meaning to share these these gorgeous journal pages from Alisa Noble of Life Is A Beautiful Place To Be fame for the longest time, because not only are they scrumptiously lovely (as all of Alisa's work is, they were also inspired by my very own Puttery Post and I'm not sure there is a higher compliment than to have your work inspire something you so ardently admire yourself...

Based on two posts from the beginning of January, Alisa has taken my suggestions for choosing a word to inspire you throughout 2010 and creating a list of books you want to work your way through monthly (come hell, high water or a brand new Marion Keyes!) and created the kind of pretty I couldn't put together if you offered me free reign in the Brocante's of Paris as a reward...

But then that is the purpose of the Puttery Post: it isn't about inflicting my puttery will upon you, it is about giving you daily starting points for thinking, and dreaming, and home-making and creating, and from those starting points letting your imagination fly, whether I'm asking you to create a garden journal or take a chamomile bath... the degree of lovely, you see, is always up to you.

Thank you Alisa, for being one of my Vintage Housekeepers, and for being so very, very talented.

Some days I get happy because the world is stuffed with wonderful things just waiting to be discovered. On my joy list this week? Finley's Egyptian dance (laugh out loud funny!), Dorothy Whipple's "High Wages" (I have acquired a lovely vintage orange and white Penguin edition this weekend), the cream chiffon top I am wearing to my Barbie's wedding on Good Friday, this utterly divine idea for storing ribbon, and the Delicious Miss Dahl, because no matter whether Sophie does or doesn't live on the scrumptiously pretty set and despite all the snarking her cookery program has inspired in grown men who should know better than to dress their envy in vitriol, I am thoroughly enjoying this series and won't hear another word against it! Do you hear me Giles Coren? Girls like us ADORE watching girls just like us (but prettier!) whip up a rhubarb and rosewater version of  Eton mess in the prettiest kitchen in the world and no amount of schoolboy twittery sniping is going to changes our minds ok??



Anyway what was I getting to? Ooooh yes Nostalgia Organics. Because Elea Lutz's darling joyful website makes me smile and who couldn't love a bar of organic everything, citrussy-lemongrass exfoliating soap wrapped in vintage inspired fabric and christened Happy Days Soap? The whole matter just oozes joy and a positive spin on the damn caboodle that is living in the twenty first century doesn't it? I mean who needs to stress about who to vote for  in an up-coming election when one could take a shower that makes us smile, dab a bit of Dilly Dally on our pulse points and set about creating something that will have us swoon in sheer rhubarby delight...

Happy days. Because we have to pocket them. And line them with lavender. And bake from the heart and love with all we've got and read all that makes us want to explode with inspiration and seek joy for the hell of it. Because even if the country is going to the dog's, and no amount of that nice Mr Cameron can save it, we can make our own worlds, the worlds within our own four walls as joyful as possible and Nostalgia Organics is a company making that kind of joy it's raison d'etre...

Happy days my Sweets.

"The Butterfly who loves cigarettes, but can never learn to lay a fire...
The Butterfly who adores dancing but is to nervy to dust a room...
The Butterfly who lives on the phone but never has time to answer a letter...
The Butterfly who delights in matinees but household shopping makes her tired...
The Butterfly who devours fiction, but cannot cook a dish to save her life!"

There is a case it seems for not having too much fun. One could you see, be accused of being a Modern Butterfly and I trust you wouldn't want that...

Me Darlings? Why I am far too nervy to dust a room...

"What is the hardest thing in the world to do?
Not in the least what most people might suppose it is, yet if we are brought up sharp we all discover what our greatest difficulty is.

It is doing the next thing, whatever that may be.

Most of us know the difficulty only too well. The last thing we can do, or feel inclined to do, is the next thing, the duty or the task that stares us in the face asking to be got through. Anything but this. The next thing but one is easy enough, and we should enjoy tackling it. But the next thing...No! it's beyond us. And it's always there, we can't get away from it.
But there's another way of looking at it. If it is an obstacle it is also an opportunity. Doing the next thing is a panacea for nearly all our woes.

 You live in Botheration Buildings and you long to move to Peace Place.
That is you have dozens of things to to, business of all kinds to get through, endless matters to arrange and you are bewildered and feel you will never get through them. You seem on the verge of apoplexy or insanity. Keep cool. Do the next thing; get it over as quickly as possible, and the battle is as good as won. You will have got up steam.

"But what is the next thing?"
Generally that is clear enough - if you are only willing to do it. If not, it is any one of the crowd of things waiting to be done. Which of them you choose matters little; do it- and the muddle begins to straighten out, and you can go ahead with the rest.
It's the same with an attack of the blues. We all get this horrible complaint at times and it is always worst when we can discover no cause for it. It just comes - and down we go.

Can't do anything, don't know what's the matter, but do know that everything's wrong.
Gloomy thoughts, dreadful forebodings, hopeless inertia. You know all about it; you've had it too often.
There is one cure for this malady- do the next thing, and do it straight away. And the next thing is probably something quite simple. It may be putting your boots on, writing a letter, making up your cash account, straightening your table. Anyhow, there it is. Do it and you'll feel more than better. You will be all right. The exertion will shake off the heaviness and set up a healthy chemical action of the brain. You will forget your wretched self- the cause of your misery.

And blunders!
We are always making them, even the wisest and the cleverest of us and sometimes they seem to have made shipwrecks of our lives. Nonsense! We must start afresh, and rebuild what we have stupidly knocked down. Here too, the only way to put things right is to do the next thing. And as with bothers and blues, that next thing is generally obvious and simple. It isn't quite obvious?  Well do something, and that will be the next thing.

As an Oxford coach used to say to a crew before a race...
"If your button gets out of the rigger, do any blessed thing- but go on rowing. " There's always one thing that you can do. Do that, and you'll do the rest.

Go on, but don't go on sitting still."

Happy Friday Housekeepers! 
Today for your home-making pleasure, those of you who have bought the Vintage Housekeepers Planner can download ten pages of blank forms to customise to your hearts content, absolutely free of charge. Based on some of the planner pages already included in your download, but with all Brocante formatting removed, you can now plan anything you like: from what to pack in your holiday suitcase to what you have got stored in the deep, dark cupboard under the stairs...

Download the blank planner pages here and as always stay tuned: I've got more pages for your planner coming very soon.

P. S: Apologies to those of you who had been trying to buy my 550 Puttery Treats Download on Etsy, I hadn't realised it had sold out, but have now re-listed it. Easter is just the perfect time to get a little puttery isn't it?

* Then on to quite a severe bout of creative jealousy, because I never saw a lovelier thing than this Pam Garrison piece of scrumptious, bohemian, vintage and homely stitching for the sheer sake of creating something for us all to drool over.
Hopping all over the internet for details of the film version of Cheerful Weather for the Wedding, David Tenant was supposed to be filming in 2007 and coming up with exactly nothing. Wondering what happened to it.
Drinking Ginger Cordial to ease a poorly tummy. Nursing ambition until the time is right.

* Dwelling on my favourite words: Debauchery. Shine.Verdigris. Comely. Home. Pernicious. Epiphany. Dalliance. Scrumptious. Fleeting. Mummy. Peccadillo. Violet. Divinity. Euphoria. Camellia. Madeleine. Ingénue. Erotica. Cosy. Lassitude. Aubergine. Friend. Chartreuse. Library. Serendipity. Thou. Pyjamas. Pomegranate. Ethereal. Sensual. Bruise...

* Playing The Girl by City and Colour over and over. "You sacrificed so much of your life in order for this to work. While I'm off chasing my dreams. Sailing around the world..." 

I can't wait!

The Delicious Miss Dahl, BBC 2, March 23rd, 8.30pm

Welcome to a scrumptious new week Housekeepers! And here I am, hands liberally doused in Wild Roses after half an hour spent rather blissfully hand-washing my smalls, (because cheap thrills have always been my bag!) and reflecting on what has turned out to be a quite lovely few days in which I do hope you didn't notice I quite simply didn't get around to blogging a single word...

You see my darlings I was busy, fit to bust, living! Yes indeed, while I am more likely to be found hanging around the corridors of my Google Reader and browsing the aisles of Amazon, last week I stepped out my front door (a door let it be known, in dire need of painting!) and went dilly-dallying all over the North West. I shopped for England. And Mothers Day. And Richards Birthday. I walked till my big old legs ached and watched more movies than I remember watching in a long, long time. I read. Of course I read. I ate blueberry yoghurt and ginger muffins and drank elderflower water till it came out of my ears. I bought my Dad a huge big pot of the all new really rather fabulous Marmite X-O from Selfridges, because he is a lover not a fighter and dragged by the ears by my son, I even attended a rather frighteningly happy clappy Mothers Day Service at the church next door. Because one has to show one's face occasionally or else the Vicar who passes my door a hundred times a day reserves a really rather spectacular "Well aren't you the scum of the earth" face, just for my benefit methinks, if I do not, while poor little Finley believes that if he finds a leaflet in his school bag inviting him to church, he has probably been personally invited by God and will be struck down if he doesn't go. So the long and the short of it is that we went. And quite frankly it was as awful as I could have ever dared hope and let it be hereby noted that our dear vicar resides over his Parish with all the smarmy smug charm of a cross between Hugh Hefner and Peter Mandleson, and were it not for the fact that religion takes place in churches I often wonder if I could get around to liking it and the whole business of contemplating all that might exist beyond my own deeply limited imagination.

But enough already with my religious ranting and let me get to my lists...

Things I Watched Last Week
* Motherhood. In a moment of sheer extravagance I chucked it into my trolley in the supermarket and spent Saturday night in the company of Uma Thurman as she thoroughly over-dramatised what it is to be a harassed blogging Mummy. Luckily for her I do so enjoy watching a bit of the kind of dramatics I usually only experience in my own head and there was much tenderness to be found in this little film so should you find yourself with an hour or two to spare I really rather recommend it...

* Alice In Wonderland. Hmmm. I'm still not sure how I feel about this visually stunning spectacle. It was a kind of spliced and diced version of a story we know and love. and that is fine but... oh but, oh but, oh but oh....Suffice to say that while I found Helena Bonham-Cater beguiling in the extreme, Finley thought she was utterly terrifying. Oh and Johnny Depp's Scottish accent made me giggle.

Things I Read Last Week
* 84 Charring Cross Road. For the love of books. Read every morning while I drank lemon tea and ate Munchy Seeds. As if those darling letters had popped through my own letter-box and I was reading them over breakfast. The perfect bite-sized literary treat. Read it as soon as possible. That I must insist upon.

* At Mrs Lippincotes.  This months book choice. And it was plain old WONDERFUL. More later in the week on this very subject. I promise.

Things I Baked. And Ate. And Swooned Over.
* Easter Biscuits. Because Marks and Spencer's version are a short-lived joy and being a bad person I want to eat them all year around so I hunted out a similar recipe, added dried cranberries and lemon juice and lo and behold my very own, burnt around the edges version of my current elevenses of choice. Delicious.

Things that Made Me Happy.
* A card in the shape of a handbag with a heart shaped chocolate inside made at the fair hands of my own little munchkin for Mothers Day, and accompanied by a copy of  the Julie and Julia DVD, which I am thoroughly looking forward to sitting down to this evening with a great big pile of magazines ripe for culling. Because I am a Mummy. And a Woman. And I can multi-task on a Monday night if I feel like it.

* A man dressed in an African Tribal affair in the centre of Liverpool, banging a big old drum and singing Robbie Williams songs. Because we are so terribly cultural in Liverpool don't you know? And he made me feel like dancing right there in front of Primark.

* Oh and speaking of Liverpool: Come Dine With Me with Claire Sweeney and Tom O'Connor and the mean lady out of Kim and Aggie who fancies herself something shocking and can't cook for a big clock but made Richard and I laugh until tears ran down our cheeks last night....

Oooh I could go on and on. You see last week I stopped letting PMT get the better of me, and decided to consider my glass full to over-flowing with somewhat invisible liquid and enjoy myself, all day every day, just because enjoyment is a choice and we are allowed to choose happiness and it's ok-ness everytime. And so I did. And Mum's roast dinner was divine and Finley waking me up at three o'clock in the morning to discuss goodness knows what wasn't the end of the world and even being forced to endure Snakes On A Plane wasn't worth crying about, because there is a huge bouquet of peach roses on the mantle-piece and a new Amazon parcel full of wonder waiting in the porch and today is the start of  another week I can bless with all manner of inspiration, should I so feel like it...

Bit's of loveliness happen all day everyday don't they, so I'm off to empty the washing machine.
Glass full to over-flowing. Glass full to over-flowing. Glass full to over-flowing. Keep saying it and one day you will believe it: I'm living proof of that, because perhaps its true: love life and maybe it does love you back.

Spring is such a gift isn't it? We muddle our way through Winter trying to see through the blankety walls we build between ourselves and real life, cursing cold and snow and bin- men who abandon our wheelie bins on frost covered paths, and it feels as though it will go on forever. That never again will the sun make the dust dance, nor will we dare to step outside without three thermal vests and the lesser spotted Long Johns...

But no sooner are we resigned to a life rich in hot chocolate and frost bite, then lo and behold, with a flick of her glittery wand, Mother Nature banishes Winter and Spring settles upon our souls, inviting us to run to the school gates without a coat and pop into the garden three times a day to watch the buds of our chamelia unfurl before our eyes. Inviting us, most curiously, to be better than who we already are.

This morning I woke up terribly early, the gnaw of period pain interrupting a gloriously vivid dream and making it impossible to sleep. And so I tumbled out of bed, all mussy hair and ruffled white nightie and crept like the ghost of myself, down the stairs.
And there it was: Spring. Right there in my living room! She'd let herself in, all green and bright and beautiful.  The ivy wrapped around the tree outside my window suddenly alive again. The sky the kind of crisp blue only Spring can deliver. The milkman whistling and jangling and happy.

And so I sat and did nothing. Staring at the sun making patterns on my Victorian floorboards, doing nothing, reading nothing, sipping peppermint tea  and making reckless plans. Dwelling on a weekend full of sorrow for a friends loss, fear of the kind of sinister goings on that have a nearby house and it's occupants held up by knife-point, and sensing that my relationship is in jeopardy because I'm too old for living right there in the moment with no plans for tomorrow. Because without plans we are lost. Because without plans we are at the mercy of trusting every fluttery emotion, unable to wrap ourselves up in the certainty of a bigger picture, no matter how vaguely sketched. Because without plans we drift, and nobody appreciates a drifter. Because as always my Darlings I am a slave to my hormones and my emotions cannot always be trusted, no matter how lyrically I might spill them out...

It is a time for starting again, Spring isn't it? A time for shrugging off cocoons and fluttering our wings again. For getting a grip on what is and not what we hoped it might be, choosing to re-invent the same scrumptious wheel, and popping possibility like paracetamol, unhindered by the debilitating comforts of Winter and not yet exhausted by the heat of Summer.

Spring I think, is more than anything, about celebrating life: new baby bunnies, frolicking lambs and ours. Our lives! It is about saying this isn't all there is and on this, the first day of my self-declared Spring, I can go out and chase life up and down the lane! I can channel Alice and admit that I used to be much muchier, that somewhere along the way I lost my muchiness and today, today my friends I am going to hunt high and low for it, and take no nonsense and remember to be myself and see the Doctor about my twitchy eye and make lemon curd and a birthday cake for Richard with hopes for tomorrow baked right there in the topping and hang out a line full of lavender scented aprons just because I can and sweep the front path and work on the project that makes me feel giddy and resist screeching when my son's teacher fails to notice that yet again he isn't in the line of children she is supposed to be delivering safely on to the playground, and instead go into the classroom myself and get him and the coat he hasn't quite managed to pull on and issue my icy, but effective "I'm so disappointed in you again Lady" face to dear old teacher, and whisper the (probably unlikely threat) of a letter of complaint and take him home and stuff him full of love and gluten free cornflake cakes and make the damn cardboard house for the school project that has turned into an a quite hideous display of parental talent and ostentation and maybe sign myself up for a course in anger management while I'm at it?


Ah Spring. You are quite the devil aren't you? Who knew you could inspire such emotion? Muchiness ebb's and flows, but as sure as Easter eggs are chocolate, you return, and I for one, adore you.

Oh what it is to be organized Housekeepers!

Friday. Though there are things to be done and food to be bought, you return from the school gates and curl up with a book you need to finish before evening when the playground mummies will gather to discuss it. Though you are one hundred and seventy pages in, there are more than three hundred pages left before you will be able to deliver your view from an educated standpoint without sounding like you have gathered opinion from one of the many on the internet now seemingly shaping your personality.
You read and because there is no milk in the house, drink sweet black coffee, pulling a musty scented blanket up to your chin and turning your phone on to silent so it's shrill ring will not disturb a world inhabited by gay men and sneering politicians. You lose yourself in it and everything beyond your sofa and the furtive realm of Conservative Britain circa 1986 ceases to exist, though guilt weighs heavily on such absorption.
You are avoiding yourself: this you know for sure.

You are frightened of the weekend stretching ahead of you. A weekend that by your own insistence, you will spend alone: face to face with what you want. What you need. But before that there is an inevitable end to deal with: a story rich in vice and greed imploding on itself. With just ten pages left, at midday you find can't bear it, so you get up, unravelling your blanket like so many bandages. You find Mrs Lippincotes neatly packaged in the porch and gather it up with a fistful of bills. Then you cook plain pasta and eat it sprinkled with nothing but black pepper from a bowl older than everybody you know. Your skin feels tight, shrivelling up, no doubt, in anticipation of your 38th birthday in a few weeks time. There is no milk in the house. Your burn your thumb. For the second day running you bite back tears.

The thought of housework appals you. Days like this come rarely now, so you allow yourself the petty indulgences of self inflicted melancholy. You read the last ten pages of the book and tap two fingers into the fleshy side of the palm over and over again. You have stepped outside yourself and don't want to step back in to the obligations of housework. Or childcare. Or behaving like a normal human being. Though reading in the middle of the day strikes you as something akin to sin,  you don't want to stop, so when you put down the most deserving of Man Booker Prize winning book club choice you barely allow yourself time to cross the decades before plummeting into Elizabeth Taylor's story of a woman unwilling to conform.

Reading in the middle of the day. You suppress a tsk and carry on.

There are just two hours left now until real life will drag you back on to the playground to pick up a child still so very high on what it is to be. Suddenly having no milk in the house strikes you as the worst kind of abbhoration: the most telling sort of domestic neglect. Tonight you must go to book-club and pretend to be normal. The sort of woman mindful of what is in her fridge. You shove feet into boots as comfortable as slippers and go out into a shock of sunshine. You must not bring a child into a house without milk. Children need milk the way Middle England needs wine: for fortitude and back-bone. Comfort and strength. You walk along, opinion springing unbidden to your mind. Opinion that will die a death on your tongue when faced with the good housewives of Aughton later on. But no matter, you know what you know.

You walk home the long way, up the hill, huffing and puffing with life. The weekend is here. There is milk in the house. You are still capable of independant thought even if you cannot express it. Not so much unwilling to conform as unable. But all is well.
All is well regardless. You dab another drop of Rescue Remedy under your tongue and try to come to terms with it.

* Next, music, because I feel like dancing this week. And throwing every window in the house open and saying hello to my chamelia which has finally got around to blooming and wearing a frilly pinny to serenade the mop brush, and having a little cry because relationships are so bloody hard, and seeking comfort in yesterday and worrying a little bit about tomorrow and mostly just playing First Aid's "Ghost Town", the first song in the player above, over and over again because the words spike me, then mixing it all up with a whole dose of happy and memories and the kinds of songs one should really only play in the car so no-one need ever discover just how ludicrous you really are. And yes, I am talking about Rupert Holmes "Pina Colada" song. Click the arrows to hear whats on my (eclectic!) playlist this week...

Just because I never want to forget how precious he looks when he is asleep.

If you are anything like me you probably have a barely checked book fetish, and find yourself acquiring book after book with hardly a good hour to spare to read!

While words may be essential to your survival, the constant acquisition of new books is bad for your purse, so today let's do battle with "Gotta have New Books Syndrome!" and instead establish a system to read what we already own before we go trawling the second-hand book shops for one more vintage literary treasure to add to our collection...