Shrinking Violets

Sorry it's been a while since I put fingers to keyboard (it doesn't have the same ring as pen to paper, does it?), but I have been incredibly busy both at work and at home.

The short burst of sunshine that arrived in Rhayader this week urged me to get to grips with the post-winter chaos that has been residing in my front garden. So armed with bags and boxes, I spent a gentle early evening on Wednesday pulling out all the dead leaves that had gathered over the winter and removing as many weeds as I could from the small gravelled area in the centre of the garden. Our is a typical late Victorian front garden, with straight path from the wrought iron gate to the front door and a little square of garden to the side of the path. Around two sides of the square are small borders that I have filled mostly with evergreen plants and with grasses and other easy care plants.

All over the front (and back) garden there are tiny pockets of colour, sweet violets are blooming all over the place... in lots of places that not terribly convenient and some that I wonder how they are managing to grow at all, let alone thrive and bloom. These are not pansies or cultivated garden violets, but the tiny weeny flowered sweet violet that was sold by flower sellers of Victorian times in little posies.

They are in the path and in the wall, in the gravel and under the bench, in the crack of the front door step and behind the giant pots to each side of my front door... yup they are everywhere and I just love them.

The tidy up at the front of the house made me do a double take inside. I have started to tackle Cecily's room in earnest, so that it is finished before she comes home from university for the summer. Yesterday in a moment of 'if a job's worth doing, it's worth doing well', I carefully peeled all the polystyrene tiles off her ceiling and stripped off as much of the adhesive and old paint that I could. Actually this was a relatively quick task and accompanied by Coldplay (on CD), I was ready to start wallpapering her ceiling in no time.

As regular readers will know, I have a decidedly dodgy back which is made worse by any tasks that involved me having both hands above my head at any one time. As I haven't yet mastered wallpapering the ceiling without two hands above my head, it is going to take a while to finish this part of the job. I can comfortably do one complete length of paper (her room is over 15 wide in each direction), but then I need to give my back a rest for a day before doing more. I think the ceiling is going to take me a week to complete.

So in the meantime, I have been preparing our catalogue on disk to send out to everyone who has asked for one. The first batch of 300 catalogues will leave us tomorrow morning and should arrive with the recipients before the end of the week. I will continue to prepare more catalogues each evening until they have all been sent out.

So here's what the first batch looks like (names and addresses have been hidden to preserve privacy). Dave has been busying himself with printing the inserts for the catalogue disk covers for me to put into the covers before they go into the envelope. He is also printing out the catalogue on paper ready for binding with my new thermal binding machine (a very cool piece of kit!).

Well that brings me up to date and it's late, so I'm off to bed, chat soon, Liz

All images and text copyright Pretty Practicals 2006 - 2008 except where stated.

Son shine

What an incredible difference a little bit of sunshine makes, today has been glorious. Okay, not a lazing on a tropical beach with a cocktail in your hand kind of glorious, but a rush out to sit in the sunshine with every mug of tea type of glorious. And for April in Mid Wales, that's pretty good going!

Today was bound to be a nice one for me, because I spent an age chatting to my son on the 'phone last night. We don't often get to natter about nothing in particular; he is busy with his work and friends and I with mine. He lives over 100 miles away and doesn't drive yet, so doesn't come home very often at all. But last night we talked and laughed and put the world to right. He even sent me a couple of photos as I was complaining that I didn't have any recent pictures of him. So here he is... in my eyes the most handsomest chap that ever was!
Alec's picture

It has been a jolly busy day at work again today, a recent order of quilts arrived late afternoon, so I was able to pack them and prepare them to go out with the couriers in the morning. We also took delivery of a large number of DVD cases, so that we can post out our catalogue on disk to everyone who has requested one. When I ordered them, I was unable to visual what a huge amount of space they would take up in the warehouse, but I quickly got the idea when they were delivered on a pallet that was piled about four feet high with boxes! Still, so many of them will be used in the next week or so that the space will quickly be recovered.

Dave has been tidying and sorting most of the day. Every now and then we like to reorganise everything. It's a good way to keep an eye on items, check them and check their numbers so that I can make sure the website has the correct stock levels on it; whilst I usually update the site each day, there are inevitably times when I can't.

I have been the admin queen today, probably most peoples' least favourite job, but I am really happy to gently work my way through administrative tasks (how sad is that?!) because I love the feeling of completion at the end of the day. So this evening's challenge is for me to do something creative in the kitchen, but it's getting pretty late in the day, so perhaps just create a quick omelette... and a cup of tea.
Chat soon, Liz
All images and text copyright Pretty Practicals 2007 and 2008 except where stated.

This season's black... Belle Noir

For anyone who likes French inspired painted furniture, but has found the most recent ornate black ranges a bit overpowering, here's a gentler, more French country style option.

I am pleased to introduce the Belle Noir collection.
Made from oak with rustic black paintwork that has been distressed to give it an aged appearance. The horizontal surfaces are unpainted, but are sealed to allow the natural beauty of the wood to show through.

The designs of this range offer soft curves, serpentine shaped fronts and a selection of both cabriole and bun feet.

We expect this furniture to be available for delivery from mid to late July, but are taking pre-orders as there are limited numbers available in the first release and we expect demand to be quite high.

The Belle Noir collection can be found in the French Furniture section of our website and includes extending tables, 3 styles of dining chair, sideboards, chest of drawers and dressers.

I can hardly wait to create a dining room corner in our showroom; the table laid with soft cream linen tablecloths and napkins, our toile table mats (with birds in black on cream) and shapely French style china. I will also use some oversized almost-black candlesticks and tall mantel clock. Yeah it's going to look lovely!
Chat soon, Liz

All images and text copyright Pretty Practicals 2007 and 2008 except where stated.

Cool Beans!

Oh dear! You know how sometimes we get a song stuck in our heads and sometimes it's a phrase, well I am suffering from 'Cool Beans' this week. My problem started when I spent a week with Cecily-Daisy, who without realising it, probably said the phrase 100 times over the time we were together. And now it's well and truly stuck in my brain and I am busy passing Cool Beans syndrome to all my friends and family. The only upside to this is that there must be lots of things that are good news or I wouldn't be saying cool beans so much... cool beans!

I overslept this morning; so not the best start to the day, but Dave made my world good again by making me a cup of tea. We then trundled off to work and packed the orders that were placed overnight and I continued to type out address labels to send out our catalogue.

As the weather was so cold and miserable, we warmed ourselves with supper of locally made sausages, bacon and mushrooms and then I had the oats, linseed and yoghurt mixture that I have been enjoying daily this week.

It's another late Saturday evening, the usual prime time television has been flickering away in the corner of the room. Inevitably, the programme I most wanted to see (Pushing Daisies) was accompanied by white vertical bands moving across the screen and the sound faded in and out, but I mostly got the gist of what was being said. This doesn't mean that I actually understood what was being said... but I did hear most of it. If you haven't yet seen this programme (you have missed 2 episodes), it is well worth a try if, like me, you have a somewhat dry sense of humour. Dave watched it with me this evening, he didn't see last week's programme and thought that perhaps he would have understood it better if he had, but I assured him otherwise.

My big sister sent me a card that arrived today and with it she enclosed a big smiley sticker for me to put on a file in my office that contains our thank you letters and cards. Actually, she is not my big sister (she's smaller and slimmer than me), she's my 'older, wiser and more beautiful sister' (according to her) and I feel very lucky to have her support and affection. I am her 'younger, prettier and smarter sister' (according to me) and we are very proud of each other.



Gosh the time has flown by and Dave had just bought me a refill... Cool Beans, Liz

CATALOGUE AMENDMENT

Catalogue Summer 2008. A price shown in our catalogue on disk is incorrect.

PIERRE LARGE FRENCH MIRROR, order number INT2329, price should read £399.00 (the price shown is the actually the delivery cost).

All images and text copyright Pretty Practicals 2007 and 2008 except where stated.

Small change, big improvement!

I love my home! After a week of hotel food, air-conditioning and constant noise, it is blissful to be once again in the quiet, peaceful and bran enriched environment that is home. I take my hat off to reps who spend each weeknight in a hotel before heading home for the weekend.

2 tablespoons jumbo rolled oats, 1 tablespoon golden linseeds,
3 very large spoons live plain yoghurt, drizzled with black treacle ~ yummy!

After just 6 days I was so desperate for some home style food that I have spent this week detoxing with live yoghurt, linseeds, wholemeal bread and salad, oh and gallons of clear, clean Welsh water. Normally I could never be accused of being an overly healthy eater, my daily diet consists of way too much tea and I am a bit of a biscuit fiend, but this week, I have craved simple food that puts something missing back into my system.

Food rant over...
this week has been great, it's been lovely to get so much feedback from people during and after the show and to get back into a routine at work. I have unpacked everything and tidy it away, answered all the emails and phone messages (I think!). If I haven't returned your call, please forgive me and I will reply as soon as I can.

The response to our postcards on the front of Period Living magazine has been huge. These cards had a space on the back for anyone who would like more details about Pretty Practicals, to enter their address and a postage paid address to return the cards to. We have been delighted with the number of requests for information that we have received in the last fortnight.

I have spent most of today typing hundreds of names and addresses onto postage labels so that we can send out our catalogue on disk to everyone who would like one. Printed copies of our catalogue are also available, they cost £3.00 each (which includes postage) and can be purchased by telephone or on our website from Saturday 19th April onwards.

Dave and I made a few changes to the layout of the Pretty Practicals website yesterday. We have removed a couple of the categories on the left hand menu and added a few too. I felt that the furniture section had become too large and took ages to find things, so we have separated the furniture into 3 sections, French furniture, country furniture and general furniture. My hope is that it will make browsing a little easier for you.

We have added a dining section for cutlery, silverware and other dining room accessories and the laundry items can now be found in the kitchen section. The fabulous country tableware that we now stock has it's own section and whilst there are only three pages as I type, I will be adding more items over the weekend.

As promised in my last blog entry, I have listed the French furniture that we took to the NEC in our clearance section. The armoire and bed have only been used for display for 4 days (the bed wasn't slept in), but because they cannot be supplied in their original packaging, we are offering them at a special price.

Now that life is getting back to normal, Dave and I have started to think about our next project. We think (but haven't made a definite decision yet) that we will finish creating one of Pretty Practicals' sister websites. Much like newcountryquilts.co.uk, our dedicated quilt and bedding site, I would like to have a specialist site for some of the other things that I feel passionate about. I'll keep you posted on any developments!

Chat soon, Liz
All images and text copyright Pretty Practicals 2007 and 2008 except where stated.

Pretty Practicals on show

Wow! What a wonderful experience.

I'm home from the Homebuilding and Renovating Show at NEC, which lasted for 4 days and was brilliant fun (that's dreadful grammer, please forgive me). We met so many lovely people and it was so nice to be able to display our furniture and accessories on a room setting, so that visitors could touch them and feel the quality and see how well things worked together.

A film crew from S4C's Wedi 7 programme came and did a bit of filming on our stand (it should be on telly sometime this week) and although we couldn't understand most of what was said to camera, I got the gist of the conversation. It made me wish that I had learnt a little more Welsh in the time that we have lived here.

Just to explain (for our visitors from overseas) that here in Wales we have some different television programmes to the rest of UK and a Welsh language channel. For people like myself who do not have satelite or cable television and who also have very poor television reception because we are tucked between mountains, our telly viewing options go something like this.. BBC1 - the snowy fuzzy version, BBC2 - clear viewing on most days except when I desperately want to watch something and then it seems to develop vertical snowy bands running across the screen, ITV1 - good picture most of the time and S4C (which stands for channel 4 Wales) - great picture, great sound, mostly in Welsh which I don't understand! Since we moved to Rhayader, we have been DVD watchers.

But I digress... the show... was better than I ever imagined it could be, was busier than I dared hope it would be and was more fun than is polite to admit to since I was working flat out. If anyone is ever wondering if they should do this show, my thoughts would be yes it's great show with a huge variety of stands and a really good forum for displaying your products (and everyone was really friendly).

Today I am exhausted, but luckily, as the shop is closed on a Monday; I have spent the day at home recouperating and relaxing. Tomorrow I will head back into the office to start packing all the orders from the last few days and getting everything as organised as it should be.
Dave has done really well in the shop while I have been absent, but as it is not his domain, there are lots of little bits and pieces to sort out. If he goes away for a few days, I can't even begin to start doing his work as I have no idea how to program in languages that he uses, to do 'the brain surgery' of our website or how to manage our webserver, so it was great that he coped with the basics of my role in our business as well as he did.

Cecily-Daisy was a superstar at the show, she worked tirelessly, cheerfully and conscientiously for the entire time. She was still laughing and smiling as she left on Sunday late afternoon to catch a train back to Bath. A big thanks to her for her unerring support to me this week. On Saturday we were joined by one of Cecily-Daisy's friends, Hannah, who managed to pick up all the information that she needed to impart in superquick time (everyone has been so efficient at the show) and helped us out no end on the busiest day of the event. My friend Clare helped us on Sunday and (bless her) stayed to help us pack everything up ready for our return home last night.

It was interesting to watch peoples' reactions to the two areas that I created, the French bedroom scene was mostly appreciated by women and the dining room furniture was liked by almost everyone who visited the stand. Dave and I have decided on our way home that we like the county style furniture so much that we are going to rearrange the shop so that we can have a big display of it there. I will arrange all the gorgeous hand decorated pottery on it as the two compliment each other so well. Hooray, I get to look at it everyday!

I will be offering the French bedroom furniture at a special ex-display price on my website (in the clearance or special offer section), it didn't suffer any damage at the show, but it just won't have it's original packaging. Obviously there is just the one bedroom set so once it's sold, it's sold!

Well, as always, it's time for the kettle to go on, chat soon, Liz
All images and text copyright Pretty Practicals 2006 - 2008 except where stated.

We're at The Show!

It's showtime! Yesterday was an amazing day. We got up bright and early and went to our unit and waited for the removals men to arrive. They arrived exactly on time and were superquick at loading everything onto their big lorry. Dave and I trundled along the lanes to the motorway and arrived at NEC about the same time as the lorry. With everything unloaded (also incredibly efficiently), the men all left me to do my magic on the stand. The boxes waiting to be unpacked.
After a couple of hours, I had done as much as I needed to do for the day and I had a gentle evening and went back to the stand today to finish off the preparations; Cecily-Daisy joined me this morning and we were finished by 2.30pm and came back to the hotel where we have been relaxing and chatting.

Cecily-Daisy arranging china on the dresser.

When Period Living magazine first asked me if I would like to create a room set or two to sit along side their part of this stand, I was delighted and my mind raced with ideas. After lots of thoughts, planning and mind changing, I decided to go with my initial ideas; sometimes it's wise for a girl to go with her first instincts. So we have created two areas, one is this dining room scene using some of my favourite country painted furniture from the Chichester range and the lovely hand decorated china, the other is a French inspired bedroom scene.

Above ~ The French bedroom scene
Below ~ this is the stand, not long after Cecily arrived.
The show opens tomorrow morning for 4 days and closes at 5pm on Sunday.

Me posing in 'the dining room'

I will get Cecily-Daisy to take some pictures once the public have arrived and I will let you know tomorrow how the first day has been.

To all my blog friends (whose blogs I leave comments on); sorry I won't be around for the next few days... but there's something going on that's keeping me a little busy!

I'm off to make a cuppa. Chat soon, Liz

All images and text copyright Pretty Practicals 2007 and 2008 except where stated.

Cats, cards and catalogues,

There were lots of things that I was going to tell you this evening and I now can't remember what they are because I have been laughing so much at my cats. Shard is sitting on one side of the kitchen cat flap and Bella is on the other side. Each time one of them tries to go through the cat flap to come in or go out, the other one is batting the flap shut with their paws so neither of them is going anywhere! If I could only teach them to be that nifty with a tin opener, they could be truely self sufficient animals.

To add to the silliness of the situation, an enormous spider (yes it really was enormous, at least the size of a elephant) has just run across the kitchen floor, between Bella's legs and under the kitchen door. I let out a little scream, Bella looked so surprised I started laughing again and now I can hear Shard munching very loudly. So she at least feeds herself! For any spider lovers out there, I apologise; I am a wimp about them and as Ted Hughes said it's 'nature red in tooth and claw' and one less for me to get hysterical about.

I'll make a cuppa and think about those things I want to share with you... okay, cuppa by my side, my memory regained, my composure almost recaptured, I'll start again.

It's been a busy few days, both at work and at home. The May issue of Period Living magazine is now in the shops and they are giving away a set of postcards on the front cover (well inside the packaging of the copy that came through my door yesterday) and included in the bundle of cards is one by Pretty Practicals. You may remember a little while ago, I was busy creating photo settings and making lovely scenes in my shop, well one of the reasons was so that we could take the photo for this postcard. I am delighted with the results, it looks lovely and it has a space on the back for people to fill in their own details and return the card (postage is prepaid) and we will then send them a copy of our new catalogue on disk.

If anyone would like a printed copy of the catalogue, it costs £3.00 including postage and should be back from the printers by the end of the month, ready for us to send out to anyone who would like it.

A couple of items from Pretty Practicals were used in today's 60 Minute Makeover programme. I had forgotten that it was today that they would be shown, so got a lovely surprise this afternoon when several people rang following the show to order both the clock and mirror that were used in the makeover. Obviously I missed the programme, but might get time to see it tomorrow. You can view it again on ITV's website for about a month after the programme was aired, which is brilliant for those of us who can't be in front of the telly in the early afternoon.

On the domestic front, my back is so very almost better, I don't want to jinx it by saying it is completely okay again, but it is definately getting there and will be strong enough for our show next week.

It is blissfully quiet here tonight (apart from the cat, spider, cat incident earlier). Dave has already gone up to bed to have an early night and there is no sound in the house except for the sound of tapping on my computer keys and the gentlest of hums every now and then from the fan that cools my laptop. I savour moments like this. Very shortly I will be heading up to have a bath with the book that I have only just started and, in silence, will read a few chapters before I too have an early night.

I hope your world is healthy and peaceful too, chat soon, Liz
All images and text copyright Pretty Practicals 2007 and 2008 except where stated.

FREE SHOW TICKETS

For anyone who would like to come to The Homebuilding and Renovating Show at NEC 10 - 13 April, I have added the link below so that you can get free tickets - hooray!

You will find us in the Restoration Pavillion with the Period Living magazine stand.

Jayne and Louise have both let me know that I obviously haven't told you enough about the show, so here goes.....

A couple of months ago, Period Living magazine asked me if Pretty Practicals would like to create a room set or two to sit side by side with their display in the Restoration Pavillion at the Homebuilding and Renovating Show and of course, I jumped at the chance.

So after much planning, fretting, organising and reorganising, I will be off to the show next week with some gorgeous furniture and many of our lovely accessories.

Have to get off to work now, but will add more later on, Liz