Me and Mine January

I've been blogging for over 5 years now but only really discovered the community of blogging when I became a parent. When I did a world of parent bloggers seemed to open up to me and there are a few I discovered in those early sleep deprived days of new motherhood that have been firm favourites and I'm happy to say have actually become friends in 'real life' too. Two of those ladies are Katie and Lucy and I've loved catching up with their 'Me and Mine' series over the past two years.

I was really honoured when Lucy emailed at the end of last year to ask if I would like to be part of the team this year along with three other beautiful families Lucy, Jenny and Alex. Although I knew at the beginning of this month I needed to get a nice shot of us together I somehow left it until just two days ago to take one. I was feeling a bit stressed about it if truth be told, worrying I'd be letting the group down and if our photo would seem to forced or rushed. Actually the day I did set out with my tripod and camera turned out to be just perfect. We stopped at a local gallery for a quick coffee and a slice of art and then pottered round the corner for crepes (us savoury, lemon and sugar for W).

Propping my tripod up on a bin (of all places) we messed around taking these silly snaps as passers by looked at us curiously. I have to say I absolutely love these pictures, I think they capture our little family so well and it reinforced just why I wanted to take part in this project. I feel so excited that there will be (at least) twelve pictures of us together by the end of the year rather than the five I've managed to accumulate over the past three years.

After we took these pictures Tom and Wilf decided they would like to visit the big libary in town and as I had some work to do I let the boys have sometime by themselves. Giving them a hug and a kiss as Wilf cheerily told me 'see you later mumma! we'll have fun!' and they trundled off hand in hand together. I'm often reminded just how lucky I am to have them and to how perfect we all are for each other. My little boy is getting bigger and whilst he used to be tied to my hip he's now enjoying things with Tom that I'm not always part of but I'm happy for that too. I'm happy to hear his their tales as he rushes through the door asking me to help him take his coat off and we sit on the sofa whilst Tom makes the hot chocolate. These are the days and the moments I never want to forget.

This month I'm sending you over to to the lovely Jenny. If you've not come across her blog before then Jenny is one of those infectiously happy and positive people. She makes the cutest videos on her YouTube channel too!

Photobox will be sponsoring Me and Mine this year. Every month one post linked up will win a photo prize. January's prize is a photo cushion and everyone linking up will automatically be entered.

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Style in your city

I'm always banging on about my love for the city of Bristol and I love showing you bits of the places I love around my neighbourhood. Bristol makes me stop and notice the beauty around me and if you let it everyday can be a discovery of something new. If I'm honest there are parts of the city I've barely been to just because it's a half hour on the bus, something I'm going to try to rectify a lot in 2015 (South Bristol I'm coming to explore!).

I've grown up in towns, cities and villages and it's safe to say I'm very much a city girl. I can't ever imagine moving away from Bristol but I love discovering new-to-me urban places and city breaks. My friend Lori and I decided it might be a fun idea to showcase some of the places we find on our daily explorations around the city, not only that we want to find out what you love about the place you live! Do you have a favourite coffee shop? A piece of street art you like to rock your outfit photos or how about your favourite place for thrift shopping? I'm just stating my favourite things in life there to be honest it can be anything! You don't actually have to live in a city either, we just kinda liked the title ;)

These photos were taken in the Bear Pit by Stokes Croft in Bristol. When I first moved to the city I would walk though the underpasses to visit Tom in his shared house from my flat by the station, there are always great pieces of street art to check out. I have to admit that a few years back it wasn't really a place to hang out but it's recently been developed with a coffee shop and fruit and veg stall built into storage crates as well as a double decker bus that is yet to be built into a cafe. There are also some planters with flowers and a little veg growing which Wilf took his magnifying glass to to inspect.

What we are wearing:

On me:

Cardigan - Fever London
Dress - Vintage (from my honeymoon in Paris)
Tights - ASOS
Boots - c/o Kaleidoscope

On Wilf:

Coat - c/o Yellow Lolly
Trousers - c/o Boden
Boots - c/o Angulus 


We would love it if you wanted to link up with 'style in your city'. We are going to run this a bi-weekly feature and it would be amazing to see peeks of where you live! For this fortnight we are going with a theme of 'the place I call home' and were hoping you might like to link up what you favourite thing about the place you live is.

You don't even need to have a blog if you don't want to you can join in with our hashtag #styleinyourcity on IG or twitter. We'll be picking our favourites to showcase on our blogs each fortnight too.

You can follow myself on IG here and twitter here
You can follow Lori on IG here and twitter here

An InLinkz Link-up

Our weekend in Pictures

Hope you all had lovely weekends! I've been feeling a little overtired at the moment as I think many of us have. That third week of January is a killer sometimes and with the weather and feeling generally a little run down it was a struggle to make it through. I can't tell you how glad I was to see the weekend.

Now Tom has Thursday's with Wilf it's really helped to ease up the amount of work I feel I need to do on the weekends. I often worry the balance isn't quite right when it comes to work/life, so much of my life is also my work and although actually that means that I often feel I'm not working it can also mean I feel like I can't escape work (if that makes any sense!). I know I'm very lucky to have the job I have though and I'm always thankful for that.

Can we pause for a second to appreciate these shoes?* Thanks
The bag and brooch are from my shop here and here.

I was recently asked if I could take a day off from the internet as an experiment and after thinking about it, I realised I really couldn't! I have taken a conscious effort to stay off my phone as much as I can though, I downloaded an app called 'checky' which told me the scary truth of just how much times I check my phone and consequently I've been putting it on the shelf when I'm home and playing with Wilf, only checking it here and there which has really cut down my addiction ;)

I've been getting into film photography a bit more and have bought a bunch of new film to try in my diana, I also picked up a super cheap second hand Holga so I'm excited to test that out. When we had the wedding I had a Instax mini and also bought an instant back from my Diana. I didn't test out how to use it though and it seemed to be printing black. I didn't realise until the end of the night when reams and reams of instant film has been used by our guests trying to make it work. This weekend I tried it out properly and realised that it isn't as simple as just shooting an instant picture as you do with a polariod or instax. I think I might do a little tutorial on it as it really isn't all that simple to realise and I wish I had known before I spent so much on film.

The camera Wilf is shooting with is a Diana Baby (SO CUTE right?) I've not yet got to the end of his film so the results will be interesting I'm sure!

Do you have any film camera's? Which one do you rate? I find it so exciting getting the prints back and not knowing if you've captured the moment or not.

Son of a tailor - giveaway

When it comes to clothes I truly believe that the fit of your clothes is as important to finding items that look, and, feel good to wear. I can't tell you how many times I've bought a dress that has a cute print to find it's cut completely wrong for my body.

Son of a Tailor got in touch with me recently to ask if I'd be interested in introducing their service to my readers and with Valentines coming up I thought it would be a great fit (pun not intended!). I'm pretty sure it's not just Tom that's hard to buy for, men are notoriously hard to shop for in my opinion.  When I start asking him what he likes he mainly says things like 'well I do need a new screwdriver' or something equally as dull (my dad was always the same!).

Son of a Tailor appreciate that the cut of a product is as important as the design and as such they have taken their Tailored T-shirts to the world 'in a bid to end bad fitting T-shirts, and make way for handcrafted truly Tailored T-shirts, which the man in your life will love'.

To create the perfect t-shirt you can visit Son of a Tailor, input vital statistics and customise by selecting preferred colour, style and adding embroidered initials for a personalised finish. Or you could simply buy them a gift card to the site so they can purchase one for themselves. 

I'm giving away one gift box to one lucky reader (or the man in their life) in time for Valentines day. To enter simply enter any/all of the below and good luck!

all entries will be added to the Son of a Tailor and Tigerlilly Quinn newsletters of which you can opt out of at anytime.

a Rafflecopter giveaway