Family Photos

I took these photos over Easter weekend with my lovely cousin Milly. Don’t you think she looks just like me?! My mum grew up in South Africa and a lot of her family still live over there so I unfortunately don’t get to see them too often. I love being a big cousin and so it was awesome to do lots of girly things with Milly whilst she was over, including this mini photo shoot with my little brother as the photographer! I’ve lived away from home for long enough though that it often feels nostalgic in that bitter-sweet kind of way to return. All the smells and nooks and crannies of my parents’ house bring back a flood of childhood memories. I’m overjoyed whenever someone reads or enjoys my blog but one of the biggest benefits of blogging is having this space to document my life and revel in that nostalgia. I’m able to look back at what I was doing and thinking and wearing as a younger version of myself. Three years ago I posted some (terribly edited…) photos of me wearing a blue fur coat in this exact spot!

Outfit Details: Dress, Vintage (Tallula Vintage, Edinburgh) / Shoes, YRU via ASOS / Jacket, Missguided (Old) / Choker, ASOS / Glasses, The Wardrobe (Leicester) / Pins and patches, Tunnel Vision, Miracle Eye and Valfre

Isn’t this the most cheerful dress you’ve ever seen? It’s a psychedelic 1970s wool dress that I picked up from Tallula Vintage at a fair in Edinburgh. There are two main vintage fairs that tour the UK – Lulu’s and Judy’s – and she tends to do all the fairs in Northern England and Scotland, and has the best 1970s vintage stock (and an impressive personal collection!) I’ve done a couple of vintage fairs with Shop Jessthetics and it’s given me a new level of respect for people who do them full time. Between packing up your car/ van, travelling, transporting all your stock and fittings up the stairs, selling to customers (the fun part!), packing down, moving everything back into your car and driving back home it’s a 12-14 hour day. It’s completely physically exhausting, and even though the experienced sellers have a much more efficient system than me, you really have to love and know vintage to be successful at it. If you’re bored of the vintage shops in your city though, it’s a great way to browse new shops in real life.

I’ve also been building a pin/patch collection on this faux leather Missguided jacket that I bought last year. It’s really fun to have an assortment of my (sometimes geeky) interests on my coat, and if all else fails, it’s a good way to strike up conversation with whoever’s at the till at the shops. James loves that my jacket looks kinda punky from a distance but on inspection my pins are all pretty cute – from avocados and cacti to my favourite Buffy the Vampire Slayer characters. That’s me – punky from far away and cute from up close.