My Week In Instagrams

1. Last weekend we took baby Joe to the farm shop near us, he loved seeing the chickens and rabbits they have there. It is such a great place to shop since you drive through the fields where most of their fruit and veg is grown to get to the shop. This pretty pink rhubarb caught my eye, it's one of my favourites.
2. We bought a bargain bag of carrots so I made these delicious carrot cup cakes -anything tastes great when you put cream cheese icing on top of it! The recipe is from Nigella Lawson's How To Be A Domestic Goddess if you'd like to try making them yourself.
3. I drank some of our sloe gin from last autumn with tonic and a slice of lime, delicious! I posted about how to make sole gin a while ago, read up now and get prepared for this autumn's sloe harvest.
4. Easter weekend was last weekend. This is all that remains of my chocolate bunny...
5. I love this sweet sewing box I got from an Oxfam shop in St Albans this week.
6. I met my sister for soup, sandwiches, and exciting chat about working together on some projects for this blog.
7. I was inspired by Emma who writes at Food Coma and A Beautiful Mess and posted recently about her green smoothie challenge. I tried one out myself, made with fresh spinach, frozen banana and pineapple. 
8. On Friday we took a trip to the museum in Tring. It is part of the Natural History Museum (whose main museum is in London) and its full of stuffed animals. It is an amazing place to take children: here is Joe meeting a tiger.
9. I love the pretty pastels that are so fashionable this spring. I thought I would try updating my look (!!!) with these sweet nail varnishes - a flash of fresh colour is always welcome!

So that's what my week looked like this week - very pink and green! I hope you had a great and colourful week too. Have a wonderful weekend,

My Week In Instagrams

1. Baby Joe and I were out early last Sunday, the supermarket car park was a ghost town, we felt like the only ones up and out!
2. How pretty are these pins I found at my Mum's?
3. We've all had a horrible cold all this week so we've been trying to self medicate with a hot toddy every evening!
4. Easter nest cakes go with Easter week like love and marriage, or a horse and carriage. Yum.
5. The main thing.
6. I went on a lovely trip to London this week, without baby Joe! Look at this totally dreamy window display at Laduree.
7. The main purpose of the trip was to see the David Hockney exhibition at the Royal Academy, which closes this week. I'm not sure if you're really allowed to take photos in there but I sneaked this one!
8. Lovely cotton prints at Liberty. If you've never been to Liberty before, I absolutely recommend it. It is the most beautiful shop in the world and sells so many pretty things, it is a London must see.
9. We took a trip to see our friends for Sunday lunch. I love how the combination of sunny weather and those clever Instagram filters can make a drive on the M1 look like a California road trip!

That's how my week looked this week. How was yours? I hope it was fantastic and that you have a wonderful Easter weekend (or Passover. Or just Bank Holiday!)

My Week In Instagrams

1. I made chocolate chip banana bread. I'll have to share the recipe for this some time, it's so delicious.

2. The primroses came out outside our front door. It feels like spring is really here now.

3. We bought some apple juice made from apples from the orchards at Shenley Park. We had this on the tables at our wedding reception.

4. I listened to some tapes from the 90s!

5. I saw this lovely mosaic in a garden wall near where my parents live.

6. All the flowers are blooming in the sunshine this week, we've had great weather.

7. This is one of my favourite views in the world, the view from the landing window at my parents' house.

8. On Sunday we went back to Shenley Park, where we had our wedding reception. The walled garden there is so beautiful, we were really lucky to find it.

9. My Mum knitted this beautiful blanket.

That's what my week looked like this week. I hope you had a good one too! Have a great weekend,

A Walk In The Woods

Yesterday we went for a walk in the woods near our house. I love the spring time when everything is green and budding. We went hunting for wild garlic, or ramsons, which are just in season now. They grow all over the woods, whole carpets of them along with the bluebells which will be coming out soon. They are easy to find because or their strong smell! We picked lots of ramsons, and had a lovely walk as well, with lots of chances for photography practice. Baby Joe had so much fun in the baby carrier, he loves being up high with the grown ups!

I'll share our ramson recipes with you soon, just as soon as we have made them!

Our Dorset Honeymoon

I thought it would be nice to share some photos from our lovely honeymoon with you. We went to Dorset for our honeymoon mainly because my grandma owns a cottage there where we could stay for free. Since we were doing our wedding on quite a tight budget, we didn't have much money to spend on going somewhere exotic, and we have always loved staying at the cottage. I have been going on holiday there since I was a few weeks old so it has a very special place in my heart.

Although our honeymoon location was based on necessity as much as choice, we had the most wonderful two weeks and if we could do it all again with more money, I wouldn't change a thing. Partly this is because holidays in the UK always remind you what a beautiful, amazing country we live in and how much there is to discover practically on your doorstep. But another thing I hadn't considered was that we were exhausted by the time our wedding was over, and it was the best thing to be going on a honeymoon we could drive to. We could travel whenever we liked, in our own car, we didn't have to worry about being anywhere on time, we were there door to door in 3 hours or so, and we didn't have to think about vaccinations, time differences and airport transfers. And the advantage of going somewhere you've been before is that you can really relax because you don't feel you have to rush around seeing every sight there is to see just in case its the only time you're there.

We had the most relaxing time ever just pottering around, making nice dinners, reading our books in the garden and sleeping about 12 hours a night, total bliss! As with so much to do with getting married, it is easy to get sucked into feeling like you have to make your honeymoon a spectacular trip of a lifetime, but after our wedding, what we both needed was a rest and time to recover from all the stress and hard work that we'd put into the day. Keeping our honeymoon domestic gave us so much more flexibility and less stress, and the fact that it was cheap seemed almost incidental. If you are currently planning your wedding I would definitely recommend you consider making your honeymoon a little more local - there are plenty of chances to go on big trips, but straight after the busiest day of your life might not actually be the time you most want to head off half way around the world.

Incidentally, the cottage in Bere Regis is available to rent if you would like to stay there, maybe even for your own honeymoon. You can see more pictures and book online on holidaylettings.co.uk

Where did you go on honeymoon? Was it near or far, familiar or new? I hope you had a wonderful time wherever you went.



PS. Want to download this sweet font for free? It's The Only Exception from Dafont

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My Week in Instagrams

What I did this week:

1. Saw some beautiful blossoms illuminated in the street light.

2. Baby Joe got his first party bag.

3. I celebrated my second Mother's Day and got this fabulous Rob Ryan book.

4. My Mum gave me a new T shirt from Gap sale. I love the print.

5. It was my Dad's 60th birthday.

6. I wore a nice cardigan (!). I loved this pattern clash between the retro floral T shirt (a charity shop bargain bought this week for £2.25!) and my Sarah Lund style snowflake cardi. I'm resolving to get braver about outfit posts - and self-portraits!

7. The adapter arrived for the macro/wide angle lens I bought and I had fun testing them out with Joe in the garden. I'm sure these will be featuring in future blog photos!

8. We ate muffins for breakfast.

9. My lovely husband made a pork pie birthday cake for my Dad. Doesn't it look great with the candle!

I hope you had a great week whatever you got up to, and are enjoying a relaxing Mother's Day today.

Collect Champagne Corks

I thought it would be fun to share with you some of my little collections over the next few weeks. I love collecting things, and have all sorts of little collections on the go. It gives me some focus when I am shopping at charity shops and car boot sales, and collections can make great displays for your home.

I thought I would start with my collection of corks. I know this sounds completely tedious, but they are not just any old corks! I like to keep champagne corks from any time we have a special occasion - a wedding, a birthday, New Year's Eve, a new baby. I write on the cork to remind me when it was from and keep them in this great vintage tin. Looking through reminds me of so many special times gone by. It may be unusual but I love my cork collection!

What do you keep? How do you store and display your collections?

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Mother's Day Stickygrams

Have you remembered? It's Mother's Day (in the UK at least) on 18th March, which is only a couple of weeks away, eeek! This time of year is really busy in our family for birthdays, so it is really hard to keep on top of all the presents and cards.

I ordered some Stickygram magnets for my mum for a Mother's Day gift recently and I am so thrilled at how they have come out. Stickygram are a company that link up to your Instagram account. Do you already use Instagram already? It is one of my absolute favourite iPhone photography apps, which allows you to add loads of vintage looking filters and frames to your iPhone photos and then share them, with followers. You can also follow other people: it's sort of like a visual Twitter. And the app is free, hooray!

Ordering Stickygram magnets turned out to be easy-peasy. You pick out sets of 9 Instagram photos - I picked ones of my parents with baby Joe - and they will print them as magnets and post them to you. Although the prices on the site are in US dollars, they are actually a UK company and my order arrived in a couple of days - so UK readers still have time to order for Mother's Days!

It is great to find ways to use all the photos I have taken on Instagram, and has inspired me to look into more ways to print them out. I really like these Instagram posters you can order online from Pinstagram. Have you found any great sites for using your Instagram photos? I'd love to hear about any recommendations!

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PS. This is not a sponsored post! Stickygram and Instagram have not asked me to promote them, I just like to share the love when I find something great! I will always make it clear if a post is sponsored by a company or is a promotion or review.

This Time Last Year

Happy weekend friends!

This is a big weekend for us because baby Joe turns one tomorrow. It is so strange thinking back to what was happening a year ago this weekend, it was the strangest day ever for me and Mr Cardigan. Everyone warns you that having a baby turns your life upside down but you can't know until it happens - by which time it is too late! We have had some of the hardest times I've ever known in the last year but also some of the happiest and most amazing times, and I wouldn't change it for the world. I love my little family!

What are you up to this weekend? Have a wonderful time whatever you're doing.

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Quotation of the week: Episode 2

Happy Friday dear Cardiganeers!

So, the second in our weekly series, "Quotation of the Week", giving you a little brain food to take into the coming weekend. Did you have a good week? Did you drag yourself through it, always keeping the weekend in sight? Well if you had a bad week the good news is, its almost over! Keep on trucking, it'll be 6 o clock before you know it and you can have a little sit down and maybe a cocktail. I hope you have a wonderful weekend planned. I can't think of exactly what mine has in store at the moment, except that it better contain the drop scones I shared with you last weekend, or else Mr Cardigan will be recieving a strongly worded letter of complaint...


I love this quotation because I am someone who struggles to make decisions and agonises over the multitude of choices we have in modern life these days. So, my message of the week is, stop dithering and pick something! Mostly this is a message from me to me, but I hope it might help you if you are stuck in the mud of decision-making hell. Remember, it is better to go with one option that to waste all your time trying to choose.


Have a fabulous and decisive weekend!




PS. I designed and laid this quotation out myself but I originally found it on Pinterest here. I love discovering new fonts and am always on the lookout for handsome free fonts to download. The one I use here is called Rosecube, I found it on The Homemade Home and you can get it on Dafont.

"Who are you? Who-hoo, who-hoo? (I really wanna know)"

Hello there follower of the cardigan!

I thought since you had found your way here you might be interested to know a bit more about me. I am the mother of a baby boy who turns one at the start of March. I used to work in museums but was made redundant at the end of last year and so am at a bit of a career crossroads at the moment, trying to work out what I want to do, what I can do, and how much of it I can fit in and still be a good mum.

Me and my lovely boy

I love history - which is why I was drawn to working in museums - cooking, design, typography, discovering vintage treasures in unexpected places, music, reading, writing, and making things. In the absence of a proper job (ahem) this year, I am hoping to spend more time pursuing my interests and seeing where it leads me, perhaps to a new career? I am also hoping to lose approximately a million stone of baby weight and, frankly, pre-baby weight this year, so if I come up with any genius tips on how to do that I'll let you know.

I'm hoping to use this blog as a place to share tips and good things, vent my spleen, think out loud and make contact with new people and exciting opportunities. The coming year feels like its going to be a bit of a leap into uncharted territory, hopefully onwards and upwards!

Have a great day,

Love Amy Xxx

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Hello Friend!

Welcome to my blog. This is a place for all my thoughts about everything, including things I think, things I make, things I do, things my baby does, things that make you go argh. Things. I'm looking forward to sharing them with you!

Have a lovely day,

Amy Xxx