Back to basics

Sometimes I get so caught up in my love for colour and patterns that I forget I also need basics in my wardrobe, you know, to balance out all of that stuff going on elsewhere. If I could I would wear patterns and colour head to toe, but I might be hauled off the streets and locked up ... so I don't.

Basics aren't very exciting though, are they? So I tend to not spend update those I already have. But even I have to admit that my white long sleeved t-shirt and it's black counterpart are looking shabby.

But salvation is near! Hubby is heading to the US next week , that land of cheap but quality basics. So I've been hitting the WWW (World Wide Wardrobe) and filling up a couple of baskets with purchases that have proved to me basic doesn't have to be boring.... so long as you can buy it from the comfort of your computer.

These delightful items will be returning to Australia in Hubby's luggage ... I just hope my other t-shirts can wait two weeks befor they decide to fall apart.

These are all from Loft - a great place to shop for well priced, good quality clothes. Sadly they don't ship to Australia (maybe soon, Loft people??) but they do cut their clothes very generously so I am an XS in their sizes. Woo hoo! And, um, is a purple dress a basic? Prehaps not but it is fun :)

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This afternoon I have some friends and their kids over (thanks to the NSW teachers strike no-one is at school) so I have made this DELICIOUS blueberry muffin bread. It's really, really good - you must try it. And don't skip the streusel bit because that is the best part - all cinnamon crunchy yummy-ness.

Oh yeah! We will be enjoying our afternoon tea today. This stuff is my new drug of choice ... replacing my previous coconut cake addiction.

Blueberry Muffin Bread

makes one 9×5 loaf

2 1/2 cups whole wheat pastry flour
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 large eggs
2/3 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup granulated sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2/3 cup milk
1/2 cup butter, melted and cooled
1 1/2 cups fresh blueberries, tossed in a spoonful of cornstarch

streusel
1/2 cup loosely packed brown sugar
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
pinch of salt
1/4 cup unsalted butter, softened
1 tablespoon milk

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Spray a loaf pan liberally with non-stick spray or grease with butter. In a bowl, mix together flour, baking soda, salt, cinnamon and baking powder, then set aside.

In a large bowl, whisk egg and sugar together until smooth. Whisk in vanilla extract, then add in milk and mix until combined. Add in dry ingredients slowing, mixing with a spoon until batter comes together. Add in melted butter and mix until incorporated, then stir in blueberries.

Mix together the streusel ingredients, bring it all together with your hands. Sprinkle over the bread evenly. Bake for 50-55 minutes, or until bread is golden and a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Serve warm with butter!

Back from Bathurst

We all celebrated the freezing cold long weekend by heading west to the beautiful city of Bathurst. So cold, so windy yet the girls had to be wrestled into socks. Why don't children feel the cold?! Is it some sort of weird evolutionary thing in case their parents leave them out in the woods? But while Hubby and I were piling on scarves and coats my three crazy girls were running around in shorts!

I was doing a lot of this ...

.... drinking tea, siting in cafes with friends, and eating pizza while drinking wine. That's about it. Oh, and shouting at the kids to put on jumpers and socks.

Also we ventured outside to admire the beautiful countryside and a t-rex fossil.

We had a great time but it is nice to be home where I can run out to the car without having to put on several layers of clothing first.

Which segues me to my current warm wooly jumper dilemma. I cannot seem to find a good looking, stylish jumper that isn't shaped like a flapping square. I do understand the boxy jumper look, and I have a couple of them myself, but I also want a nice slim jumper that flatters and is interesting instead of one that just sort of hangs there.

Smelly but sweet

We have a nice little veggie and herb garden going at the side of our house - it is truly surprising how much stuff you can grow in a relatively little space.

Hubby loves to grow tomatoes, but hates the fight with the fruit flies that has to happen every year. I also love to reap the benefits of lots of lovely tomatoes, but the thing I love to grow the most is a very humble and often overlooked vegetable - the spring onion.

For real, you cannot kill a spring onion plant. It will grow and grow and give you a free spring onion whenever you need it.l You don't have to love them or care for them much at all - it's all giving and no taking with the spring onion.

I also love the way they look in a cool pot - like some sort of smelly, but architectural, grass.

They are so sweet straight out of the pot that my girls pick them and eat them sometimes when they are outside. I know this because I smell the tell-tale odour of onions on their breath!

They don't love to graze on them as much as they love to graze on the parsley or the strawberries, but they do have a pretty healthy appetite for them when really all they are is just baby onions.

I currently have about six pots of lovely spring onions so I am finding many creative ways to use them - I haven't yet managed to weave them into a pair of wedges but there's still time!

I use them instead of leeks or normal onions in most recipes, and often make these Green Onion Pancakes from Delicious Days. Try them, you won't be sorry.

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I do love a nice big flower sprucing up my chest. I have looked all over etsy for just the right flower pin but so far nothing has seemed quite right. So I thought I'd try my hand at making one myself with a piece of felt from the girl's craft box.

 

 

 

It's probably not the colour I would have choosen if I had a choice of all colours, but I think it will look pretty punchy with a grey jumper or jacket. I'm not going to show you the back because I need to figure out a way to make it look nice back there, but I'll keep that hidden.

 

 

 

 

 

German VJ Anastasia Zampounidis adds some interest to her dress with this huge pink flower. I like this look - it's something unexpected.

 

 

Actress Carolina Crescentini wears are rather fetching floral arrangement with this beautiful dress.

 

 

 ... and if it's good enough for the Queen and Lily Allen it's alright by me.

 

Game of Thrones - beauty among the beasts

Well, I have officially joined the rest of the tv watching world and am completely obsessed with The Game of Thrones.

The acting, the sets, the scenery, the sex, the costumes, the dragons! Argh - it's all so lush and divine that my eyes barely know where to look.

Hubby and I have taped the first season and most of the second season and we are trying really hard to pace ourselves so that we don't run out of episodes too soon .... making our life meaningless and empty.

The ladies of Game of Thrones are all so beautiful, even when they are bitchy, conniving and completely unlikable. Even when they are covered in brusies and blood they are beautiful.

So I had to find out more about them, and lo and behold they are also stylish! Bonus!

Of all the female characters on GoT the one I like the least - by a thousand miles - is Cersei Lannister played by Lena Headey. But Lena is so cool and funky that I am actually starting to warm a little to Cersei... but she does need to back off and stop being such a 100% dangerous cow!

My favourite character is played by Emilia Clarke - she's the blood of the dragon queen, Daenerys Targaryen. She's beautiful and ethereal in the show so I knew she'd be gorgeous out of character.

Bringing the GoT inspiration into my daily fashion life is a hard ask because most of the time the girls are naked, wearing armour, or swanning around in huge robes that ummm, don't really suit my lifestyle.

A GoT girls would need some hard-core gladiator sandals as well ... but you need to be able to run from knights, wolves, and who knows what else, so better make them flats!

This tank from Suede is like soft gorgeous chainmail. Its the armour a girl can put on to go to war at work!

Suede alslo sells this amaaaazing neck-piece which looks like it would stop a spear or two.

This fabulous bag by Valentino (don't look at the price tag!)is like a panelled leadlight window in a forboding castle - just the right amount of Medieval for a GoT look.

Feeling like a pumpkin

Pumpkin soup for dinner last night. It's the soup we have that heralds that staying home and staying warm thing that happens to everyone during winter. We also lit the living room fire for the first time this year - so it's officially cold in the evenings around here!

Look at the beautiful pumpkin colour. I have found myself feeling more and more affection towards the yellow/orange end of the colour spectrum.

I have a yellow cardigan that everyone comments on every time I wear it. It's a lovely cardi but it's the colour that gets people's attention. Yellow is such a bold statement but it's beautiful. I don't have anything orange in my wardrobe - apart from some orange jeans from Country Road that I haven't been brave enough to wear. They looked a lot less orange in the shop! I think I might have to change my fear of orange.

There was something fruity going on at the Schiaparelli And Prada: Impossible Conversations' Costume Institute Gala in New York this month because both Ginnifer Goodwin and Kristin Bell wore beautiful orange dresses.

My online shopping mission to get some orange into my life unearthed these little treasures....

 The dress I dream about from Anthropologie.

A definite pop of colour from Piperlime.

Fabulous wedges from Anthropologie.

Orange for your fingers from Ruche.

Birdy love

This is Maggie - the magpie that has adopted us as her family. We think we was knocked out of her nest during some windy weather a couple of months ago because she adopted us when she was fluffy and grey. Now that she is a young adolescent she's decided that all of the food and love we gave her back in her younger days is still worth hanging around for.

And, she's so smart and so funny that we let her!!

Whenever we go outside the house she's there on the hedge singing us a beautiful magpie carol. She sometimes swoops down and lands right on top of my head. She then slides down my hair and tries to find a perching spot on my back - never on my shoulder because that is strictly for pirate parrots only.

When I am weeding the garden and digging in the soil she is there, practically sitting on my garden trowel, with her beading eye looking out for worms and beetles to eat.

She likes to flip over on her back and let the sun shine onto her tummy - or get a tummy rub if she's very lucky. My girls would rub her tummy until she has no feathers left if she let them ... and I think she would.

We don't feed her and we don't know where she goes to every night, but we are always happy that she is back to sing to us every morning.

She's my fashion inspiration today - black and white is alright! Well, this is mostly white, but that's alright too.

In theory I like this look from Nelly Furtado at the Billboard Awards - but the dress is too long, the necklace to big and the hair too severe. I do love Nelly's music though so I'm going to let her have the comfort of knowing that I think the dress is beautiful.

But Lisa Marie Presley took the dress-like-a-magpie theme waaay too far! Her lower half is horrible.

Wow! Kelly Brook in Cannes!

This is exactly what I would wear to the opening ceremony of the Cannes Film Festival (if anyone ever asked me to attend) but Jessica Chastain wore it instead.

Breakfast of champions

My 10 year old daughter has the dreaded NAPLAN tests all this week so I am sending her off to school with a full belly ... it helps the brain instruct the hand to get all the questions right, you know!

Yesterday is was porridge with frozen berries mixed in and a sprinkling of brown sugar. Today is is french toast with honey bananas and hot chocolate. Not only does this combo give the brain the jolt it needs, it warms the cockles on these decidedly chilly mornings. We love to watch the steam rising off the back gate as the sun heats up the morning dew .... it makes up feel like we are watching the fog roll in on a Scottish isle. Then a kookaburra will land, dangling a dead skink, and shatter that fantasy.

Miss 10 years old is all fired up to blitz the tests as she just heard she has been accepted into her preferred high school for 2014. Very exciting for us all. I have three girls and they will all be going to this high school so I will be reading notes and attending special days for the next 10 years.

And, am I the last person in the world to fall in love with Game of Thrones? Heck it's good. I feel inspired to do go off and stalk Emilia Clarke online now. I hope she dresses well because I'm going to feature her tomorrow.