Oh, I do like to be beside the seaside...

Oh dear, ...

... summer time blogging is perhaps...

... a little optimistic...

Particularly if...

... one is meant to stick to interior decorating or garden themes...

...when all one wants to do is dip one's toe in the gorgeous waters in Cornwall!

Well, technically, we are not on holiday yet. The boys are still in school for another two weeks, but a sunny weekend not long ago, we said goodbye to our lovely-but-oh-so-inland town and enjoyed the sweet little Cornish coastal town of Padstow, with its STUNNING beach and marine spirit. The boys loved playing on the beach, even if the first photo above reveals that the water temperature was perhaps not as Mediterranean as the "azure" colours of the water... It is no surprise painters flock to Cornwall: the colours, the views, the LIGHT!

Well, as I am very fond of the New England nautical theme, and as this is still attempting to be an interior decorating blog, here is a reprisal of some images from my older son's room, where there is a mixed theme of sea and space. The boat-shaped shelves on the wall were found in a charity shop for a few pounds, and with a lick of paint and a couple of bent plastic pipes (for "blast-off purposes"..), they were quickly turned into space rockets. 

The nautical theme is easily achieved with a few stars here and there, and rejected old jeans offer the perfect material for a denim star appliquéd onto a cushion. The marine inspired star picture below was made with some rough pieces of wood, which on purpose were allowed to "separate" a little, in order to give them a slightly weathered look. A painted star with stars and then, the final touch: a tiny piece of thin wood with a printed sign glued on (with transparent decoupage glue), indicating - rather falsely, I confess - that our little town boasts a marina...

You can find more images from this room here.

Thank you SO much for your kind words about my last blog post and 

welcome to all of you new readers! 

I hope you are enjoying a wonderful summer, wherever you are!

Helena

Filthy feet...?

Sooo, what does any dignified blogger do when she finds her summer feet to be slightly dirty...?

Well, she - of course - casually skips across her well-manicured lawn to...

...the casually positioned foot bath which...

... of course always sits here, on standby,
with a linen curtain so naturally hung in the walnut tree...

... and the bath water always offering a fresh scattering of peony petals...

She then relaxes without a care in the world, 

occasionally reaching for the French olive soap that never looks messy...

... and thinks about how lovely it is to live in a blogger's universe...

OR... 

... she ignores the feet, the washing, the laundry, the work, the cereal spillage on the kitchen floor, the part of the lawn which remains to be mowed, the other hundred and one ought-to-do's... and plays around a little with props and cameras and a dream that one day, one day her reality might actually resemble this tranquil pampering zone...

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Thank you for all of your lovely comments on my last blog post  - you are so kind! I would also like to send a  special thank you to Lada who a few days ago left me a comment on a blog post from over a year ago, where she told me fascinating details about a Russian caramel tin I showed in that post. Thank you so much, Lada!

I wish you all a delicious weekend and may your world be filled with peony petals!

Helena

In my home town...

Dearest blog readers,

With very little to blog about on the home front...

... I took a stroll around my little home town the other day...

... and for a Swede missing her beloved Swedish tradition of the Midsummer festivities last week...

... these views offered a small consolation...

... for the absence of silly songs and jumping like frogs around a phallic pole...

... but only just...!

Again, thank you new readers and old, for stopping by my Swenglish blog world. Thank you SO much for leaving kind words, both fellow bloggers and anonymous readers - your words are precious, even if I am still a very "silent" blog friend on your blogs.

By the way, should you be a potential buyer for one of the cottages in our neighbour village Biddestone (that I showed here the other day), you can check them out on www.rightmove.co.uk, Biddestone. (The one by the pond seems to have been taken off the market, though.) Should you on the other hand feel like a slightly larger property and happen to have £ 3,500,000 floating around in your pocket, another house has just come on the market in the same village, which could relieve you of the burden of that petty cash...

I hope you are enjoying a lovely summer, wherever you are!

Helena

Between the showers...

Having spent the morning clearing out the car after yesterday's car boot sale, taking what I did not manage to sell down to the charity shop, I felt it was time to relax in the garden for a few minutes. Sticking with the recycling theme from yesterday's and this morning's activities, I used some of my bargain finds from a "brocante" in Bath a few weeks ago. The French-inspired vintage market only had seven (!) stalls, most of which were a non-starter for my wallet, but one splendid gentleman clearly wanted to get rid of his things, and offered "oh-my-word-that-is-so-cheap-I-can't-resist" items that not only boasted a tastefully modest price tag, but also had - in my eyes - a certain "je ne sais quoi"...

From the French 'brocante': the two hanging lanterns and the old jelly mould (here acting as fruit basket).

The tray is an old peach crate, and I love how both its age and the tre-digit company phone number have been stamped into the wood, almost "engraved", on the side. The green linen fabric is an old curtain that used to hang in my kitchen in Sweden, and the belt was rejected by the man in the house when they came with his new trousers. A little too new and smart-looking for my taste perhaps, but I thought I would try an idea I had got from Susanne with the wonderful blog "Me and Alice". She used what looks like a softer,well-worn leather belt on a cushion in a neutral colour, and I think that works better than my efforts here. But how boring life would be if I did not experiment a little...?

As I am writing this, it is raining again. Like it did last night... and the day before... and supposedly tomorrow...and for days to come. The old Swedish saying "It is good for the potatoes" seems a little tired and over-used now, and I long for my bad hair days and pale face days to be replaced by sun-caressed, soul-warming summer days. Come on, clouds, surely you have better things to do than hover here?

Oh, dear. A not so bloggable part of our garden, in full view here. The lawn in bad need of a little TLC (= Tender Love and Care), the fence which is no longer so "charming" in its shabby raggedness, the cable running along it to provide electricity for the workshop further down the garden. Ah, well, there you have it. A little dose of Swenglish reality.

Wishing you sun-caressed days, wherever you are!

Thank you for visiting my blog and for all your kind comments - I appreciate every word.

Helena

Beautiful Biddestone... Part II

I just love the "unshaven" look of the front garden in the first picture, slightly wild, but colourful and relaxed. A bit like the way I would like to think of myself on a rough hair day...

Oh, should any of you feel a sudden urge to move to this picturesque little village, I can reveal that the first cottage in the last photo is for sale, and so is the one by the village pond, in photo number three... Will we perhaps be neighbours soon...?

Wishing you a relaxed, colourful and perhaps wild - in a good way - day!

Helena

Beautiful Biddestone... Part I

Yesterday afternoon, my oldest son went to a birthday party in one of our neighbouring villages, beautiful  Biddestone. Meanwhile, his younger brother and I took a stroll around this gorgeous little English gem... Aaah, this neighbour is easy to love!

I always feel a little uncomfortable taking photos of other people's houses, but I hope the owners don't mind my admiring their beautiful homes through my lens... Something tells me I am probably not the first one (nor the last) to go a little snap-crazy in this village either.

Wishing you a lovely day and thank you SO much for all of your kind, encouraging comments - I really, really appreciate every comment, every word.

Helena

Ps. If you feel these images are too large for your computer screen to comfortably fit them in, don't forget you can always zoom out a little (I find 83% is usually a good size).

In a recycling mood...

With a thousand new ideas in my head, but lacking the time to realize them, and with skies whose hobby seems to be to shower me with wet drops the second I set foot outside, like a young rascal with a water balloon just sooo tempting to throw at a passer-by... well, instead of potentially interesting new pictures, I think today's blog post will be some recycled images from May last year.

My beloved bluebells were in full bloom and I could not resist to set a little tea-for-two table in the garden...

I know ivy can be intrusive and even knock over walls with their growth power, but I can't help it, I just love their evergreen loveliness draping walls and tree trunks.

A special welcome to all of you new readers (and of course a warm hello to old readers too). In the past couple of days my blog visit counter has shown more than a staggering 1500 visits per day, and as this is a lot more than usual, despite my not having posted anything for over a week, I can't help but wonder if my blog has appeared somewhere that I am completely unaware of...(other than the normal blog rolls on other blogs, etc)? Either way, it is very flattering and welcome, WELCOME all of you!

Ps. I have now heard that some other bloggers have experienced a similar "rush" of visitors recently, so perhaps my flattering "popularity" is rather the result of a misbehaving counter..:-)  Have you had a similar experience with the numbers?

Wishing you all a lovely weekend!

Helena

(As I did not yet have my small round garden table at the time of  taking these photos, the "table" above was made with a round piece of MDF on top of a couple of wooden boxes. "Mosquito net" style curtains for a few pounds from IKEA act as table cloth - a cheap and easy way to add a romantic feel to a table decoration, and when outside, they flow beautifully in the wind.)

Summer outside and in...

Just after I took the photos for the last blog post, 

the rain clouds drew closer and I decided it might be

 a good idea to move summer indoors instead...

Garden-harvested white beauties, pretty even as they are wilting...

And what if we check out a different angle of the room...?

Well, then we find the slightly "overbearing" former TV-cabinet, now housing a sowing machine and all sorts of craft material. Next to it, one of my grand-parents' old chairs, recovered in a cushion cover from H&M, in front of which lean some of my wooden trays and bowls, awaiting their next "assignment"...

***

Another guest appearance...

The Swenglish Home is today featured on the life style website Mammas Egen (Mum's Own) in their series "Room of the Week": http://www.mammasegen.com/material/otroligt-vackra-hemmet-i-danskfransksvensk-countrystil. Thank you, Camilla, for asking me to contribute to your site - I feel honoured!

***

Wishing you all an invigorating day in the sun!

Helena