I haven’t sewn a stitch in two whole months. This is a very, VERY long time for me. I also haven’t been around much on social media and let’s not even talk about my goal to write a blog post every week. However, there is a good reason for all this. Here’s what happened in these last few (crazy) weeks:
It’s been a looong time coming, but we moved from the Granite city to the Big Smoke! Right around the time I was going absolutely crazy for not knowing if we were going to stay in Aberdeen or move to London or move to who knows where (!) Maarten came home with some good news. We were moving to our favourite city, something I secretly hoped for all along! After that things suddenly started moving really fast. Before I knew it I was on a plane and 1 hour and 40 minutes later I arrived in our new hometown. The first step was deciding which area we would like to move to. This was actually an easy task for us, we both fell in love with London 10 years ago, during our first weekend away together. The hard part is to find an area that you love AND is affordable.
Exploring the Richmond area on a lovely sunny day!
After a lot of exploring and more house visits than I can count, we found our dream apartment in St. Margarets, which is near Richmond in south west London. It’s a lovely area with lots of green and beautiful parks, the Thames, cute little shops, cafes and most importantly, a local fabric shop (Loving the Fabric)! Our apartment is really bright with beautiful wooden flooring and huge windows in each room. It’s not big, but it’s perfect for us.
Whilst everything was arranged down south we still had a lot to do up north. We flew back to Aberdeen to pack up our stuff and arranged for it to be moved. Before leaving our home for the last time we said goodbye to all the amazing friends we made the past 5 years. It was difficult leaving everyone and everything behind, knowing that we have to start all over again, but adventure was calling!
We then took a few days off to drive down so that we now have Betsy (our car) here. It was really lovely to see a bit more of England. We stopped in the Lake District, Liverpool and Birmingham. Of course I couldn’t leave Birmingham before visiting Guthrie and Ghani. What a beautiful shop, with so many different fabrics, it was hard to restrain myself to only buying one. I left with Bye Bye Birdie from Atelier Brunette in black, which I’m planning to make a Bridgetown dress with.
The Bridgetown dress from Sew House Seven and Bye Bye Birdie fabric from Atelier Brunette.
After driving 550 miles in total we arrived in London. One of the biggest tasks I had the past few weeks was to decorate our new home and buy furniture. Our home in Aberdeen was fully furnished so we never had our own bed/ sofa/ dining table/ chairs etc. I needed to start from scratch! I think I would describe our style as mid-century modern and I spent many hours on Pinterest and Nina’s Apartment blog for inspiration. It’s still not finished but here are a few sneak peeks of what it looks like now.
A few snaps of our living room so far.
I still have a few boxes to unpack and not everything has found a permanent place yet but I’m getting there. A few things on my to do list are: buying curtains and a mirror for the living room, making cushions for the sofa and ordering a shelving unit for my sewing room, or how my husband calls it: the “spare bedroom”. Other than that all I have to do now is settle in, and find my way into the awesome sewing community here in London. Oh and finding a nice job would be awesome too 🙂
Till next time! Love, Barbara.