Pretty Nostalgic Magazine Subscription Offer and Giveaway!!

Many of you will have read and perhaps commented upon my recent post on the wonderful new bi-monthly magazine; "Pretty Nostalgic". If not, you can view that post here.

I was very pleased yesterday to receive an e-mail from Sarah, co-founder of the magazine, who loved the post, and has asked me to let you all know that if any of my followers wish to subscribe to the magazine, then they will also receive the Pretty Nostalgic Home book, (RRP £25.00) absolutely free!! This is a great offer, and is usually exclusive to special events and shows, not through the website. I received the book, free, when I subscribed at the RWAS Smallholder and Garden Festival recently, and I can guarantee that it's absolutely beautiful!





If anyone would like to take advantage of this fabulous offer, then all you need to do is be a follower of my blog, and mention Evelyn-May and this offer when subscribing, the website can be found here.

This leads me on to my first ever Giveaway! I wanted to host one upon reaching 50 followers, but that moment came (and went!) when I was busy with Mia's birthday celebrations, so i'm now celebrating (almost!) reaching 60 followers instead! SIXTY! Goodness me, thank you all so much, I still cannot quite believe I've reached so many. I would never have imagined this back in January when I first started my blog - I didn't think I'd get any! I can't tell you how thrilled I was therefore when I spotted that little Toadstool which turned out to be Julie, my first ever follower!! (Thank you Julie!).

So! As a thank-you, I'm hosting a Giveaway for my copy of Pretty Nostalgic (I will hate to part with it, but really want to pass it on for someone else to enjoy) TOGETHER with a "mystery" box of craft and vintage goodies!! I can promise you will love them.

I will leave this Giveaway open for the next fortnight, and will announce the winner at 7pm on Friday 22nd June! It is open to All of my lovely followers, no matter where in the world you are!!! All you need to do to enter is leave me a comment below. You will receive 2 entries if you mention this Giveaway and subscription offer in the sidebar of your blog and link it back to this post. Feel free to use this badge:



Good Luck!! xx

The Village Jubillee Party & Fancy Dress

Well wasn't the long Bank Holiday a treat!! A shame about the weather, although Monday was, at least, dry! And even the sun came out in the afternoon for the local village Jubillee celebrations!

Mia came home on Sunday evening, I was SO happy to see her, and she was very pleased with the dress!! She tried it on right away, and luckily for me, Teddy had been a great model, as it fitted her perfectly. All it needed was a few tucks in the skirt to "bunch" it up a little and the train hemmed, and we were then ready for the party!!

The Jubillee event took place in the local village where my husband grew up, and was well attended by over 250 people! We were extremely lucky with the weather, and it got better and better as the afternoon progressed.

Mia tried the dress on one last time before we left, although she didn't wear it in the car - she would never have got in! Here she is, minus my long blue satin vintage evening gloves, which she put on once we'd arrived;







A local farmer hosted the celebrations in one of his fields, and the trestle-tables were assembled in a barn, complete with bunting and of course the Union Jack;





The Vicar opened the event with a few words and Mia was thrilled when he asked her, along with the winner of the "best crown" competition (a second-cousin to my husband) to stand alongside him as he made his speech;



Next was the fancy dress competition..Mia waited as the winner was announced, just look at the face!;



And was very pleased indeed to win first prize of £5.00!





We then went back to the car for a quick outfit change! The dress was great, but certainly not the most suitable attire for the huge trampoline and bouncy castle!(can you imagine!) Though in keeping with the Jubillee theme, the next dress was still patriotic!;



Mia spent the rest of the afternoon enjoying the attractions;





There was a raffle, treasure hunt, and "name the bear", hubby's gran had knitted the outfit for the huge teddy prize, whose name turned out to be "Frederick"!



And a vintage farm machinery display;





Baby Boy enjoyed himself too - all dressed up in his red, white and blue!;



At 5pm it was time to assemble in the barn for the Jubillee tea-party - it was a huge spread! We devoured the delicious assortment of sandwiches, sausage rolls and cupcakes whilst enjoying music from the 50's;







Someone had even made a lovely cake;



After tea, the children were presented with their commemorative mugs;



And lucky old Mia, as usual, (this isn't the first time!) won a prize in the raffle, an extremely large bar of chocolate!



The celebrations ended with a game of football in the field - this took my lovely husband straight back to his childhood! He and Mia thoroughly enjoyed it whilst Baby Boy and I watched;



Finally, at 9pm, we took a very tired but happy Baby Boy and Mia home to bed, we had all had a lovely time, what wonderful memories we will have of the Diamond Jubillee! Hopefully a day that Mia will remember for the rest of her life!

Big Fat Jubillee Wedding!!!

This is only going to be a quick post, i'm actually in the process of uploading some photographs of the Jubillee Swaps that i've taken part in, so I will finish that post off tomorrow. First though, I wanted to show you what i've been up to today!

By the way, thank you all for your comments on my previous post, especially regarding Mia..she is home!! That is, she's back in the UK, she won't actually come back to me until tomorrow evening, but i've spoken to her on the phone, and I'm happy again now that I know she's close by. She sounded very tired, but happy, and i'm sooooo looking forward to seeing her tomorrow!

In the meantime I decided to make her a costume for the Fancy Dress competition at the Jubillee event that we are attending on Monday afternoon. There is no particular theme, the children are allowed to dress up in anything they choose, but I wanted to carry on the Jubillee theme. Yesterday I was completely stuck for inspiration, and came home from town with nothing! But this morning Baby Boy & I went back again and spent a good half our in our local haberdashery. Gosh I LOVE it in there, shelves upon shelves of ribbons, sequins, feathers, and rolls of every kind of fabric imaginable! I came home with 2 metres of Union Jack satin, 2 metres of red sparkly netting, 3 bags of red, white and silver sequins and some silver ribbon.

My plan was to make some kind of dress, using Mia's old bridesmaid dress (from our wedding) as an underskirt. What I desperately needed though, was a dressmakers dummy - something which I don't have! So, I had to improvise...and 10 minutes later hubby walked in as I was busy sticking one of Mia's large teddy bears on to an old clothes stand with parcel tape! I must have looked completely crazy..but it worked very well!! Once i've taken the dress off it I will post a picture, it looks hilarious!

Finally, after an afternoon of sewing, my inspiration came back! I think it must have been the large amount of sparkly red netting - that, coupled with the huge hoop underskirt made me think My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding So...here we have ...MY BIG FAT JUBILLEE WEDDING!:

What do we think? I just Mia to come home tomorrow and try it on, so I can add tucks in to the skirt, and hem the train..which is going to a LONG train!! and i've already started making a crown from the silver, red and blue sequins;

Hopefully Mia will be very pleased! Something nice to come home too - she has no idea we are even going to the Jubillee party, so it will be a lovely surprise! I'm looking forward to her trying the dress on tomorrow - hopefully it will look a lot better on her than on the bear! I will keep you posted!

I hope you are all enjoying the weekend so far, i'm really enjoying all of the Jubillee-themed posts lately, everyone appears to be getting in to the spirit of things, making and decorating! I love it! xx

A Trip Down Memory Lane

I love old photographs, I could literally spent hours flicking through an old album, and the older the better. I also love finding out about my family history, and luckily for me, my mum had traced both sides of the family back a very long way.

I was pleased therefore, when Mia's half-term homework project was to compile her "family tree". The children were allowed to make it as thorough or as simple as they wished, and could present it whichever way those chose.

My mum was also in her element, and delighted in teaching Mia all about her ancestors, and browsing through the old albums, and I enjoyed this too.

We really went to town, and are thrilled with the result;

I hope this little project has made Mia more aware of her family, and appreciate that although many of them, perhaps just people in photographs to her, if they had not existed, then neither would she or I. I hate the thought of these late family members being forgotten, their idetities not passed on down through the generations, and lost forever. I have really enjoyed getting to "know" our relatives, and plan to display many of these beautiful photographs, so they will become part of our home.

This is my Great-Grandmother Bertha, taken in the mid to late 1890's;

Her wedding to my Great Grandfather William in 1902, I love the beautiful dresses, and even the family dog attended!;

Her sister's wedding in 1904; her mother, my Great-Great Grandmother Julia is the lady standing on the right (as we look at the photo) in the nice hat behind the sitting bridesmaids;

And this is her mother, (Mia's Great-Great-Great-Great Grandmother) Elizabeth; taken before both weddings, as she passed away before 1900. This photo was taken in the early to mid 1890's. Just think she was born almost 200 years ago! Mia found that facinating! Also a little hard to imagine I think;

This is Bertha's younger sister Martha, taken in the mid/late 1890's, isn't she pretty, I love to study the beautiful outfits and how they wore their hair;

My Great Grandparents on my Nanna's side, with my Nanna as a little girl, this would be around 1916;

Nanna with her own little baby (my mum!) in 1939/1940. My mum was born just before War broke out, and her most earliest memory as a little girl, was hiding in the Anderson Shelter in the back garden while the bombs were being dropped on Birmingham; (very close by!!)

My Nanna as a young woman, before she was married, in the mid 1930's

With my Grandpa; this was probably just after they were married, It always strikes me how "young" they look, and makes me a little nostalgic and sad - as of course I only knew them in their 80's and 90's.

And a family hoilday in the late 1940's; with my mum and her younger sister Sue, my mum loved the donkeys, (as of course do I!)

An older Nanna & Grandpa, some time during the 1960's;

Bertha as an old lady, just before she died in 1962;

And finally...ME as a 5 year old bridesmaid in 1986 with my Nan, outside their family home. They lived there for the rest of their lives from the day they were married (it was a wedding present from Bertha and William, my Grandpa's mum & dad), until my Nan passed away in 2007, age 96. It was very sad to have to clear the house and see it sold, but were were happy that it went to a young family, with two little boys..hopefully they will spend a long, happy life there too, just as Nanna & Grandpa did!

They may be all gone now, but at least we still have these lovely memories and some beautiful photographs to cherish. Now I must find a nice way of displaying them!

Thanks for taking a trip down memory lane with me; Marina x

To The Fairy Garden and Back

Well it looks like the weather is about to take a turn for the worse here, i've just come in from tucking up the rabbit & guineas for the night and my flip-flopped feet are chilly to say the least! Still, it was lovely while it lasted! I thought i'd share some photos from our morning with Nan and Grandpa last Sunday. We went my favourite walk along the lane, where I took the "snowy" photos in one of my first blog posts - how different it looks at this time of the year! Beautiful in a different way;

As you can see i've been playing around with the collage effect on Picmonkey, the foxgloves, cow-parsley and bluebells were out in abundance;

Spot the Red Kite in the centre;

We missed Mia, who is still on holiday with her dad, but Baby Boy really enjoyed himself, taking it all in;

This really is one of my most favourite places. I grew up here, and have walked along this lane countless times. My mum used to push me along in my pram, just like we do with Baby Boy, and Mia before him. I have some very happy childhood memories playing in the woods and lanes, collecting foliage for wreaths at Christmas time and finding birds' egg shells and wild flowers in the Spring and Summer. Mia calls it a "magical place"..and it is! When my late Gran were alive she would take me walks along this lane when I was very little and tell me there were fairies. We once made a little "fairy garden", a clearing amongst the rocks. We decorated it with pretty stones and flowers - to this day my mum will still refer to it as "the fairy garden"; "we'll just walk to the fairy garden and back".

It really is the sort of place you might have found one of these, a hundred years ago;

After a lovely walk, we went back to Nanny & Grandpa's, where I took some more snaps before lunch;

The now not-so-little lambs were enjoying the sunshine;

As were the ducks and geese;

I hope you have all enjoyed the sunshine...while it lasted!

Thank you for all your lovely comments on my previous post regarding Mia being away, they mean a lot. I must admit i'm not feeling myself these last few days, and it's definitely because she's not around. I won't see her until Sunday evening, but they actually fly home on Friday, so I will feel much better when I know that she's back in the UK at least! I'm already planning lots of fun things to do with her next week, i've taken the Wednesday off work, so no more office for me until Monday 11th June! :)

Marina xx