Quirky Advent calendar

Time’s ticking on – so you better be quick if you want to order an Advent calendar for this year. This lovely DIY calendar kit from Bodie and Fou caught my eye recently. 

It’s 24 flat-packed boxes, ready for you to fold. Each little box has two faces with super cute designs from Noix de Coc and the other two faces have been left blank for you to customise…then you (or Father Christmas!) can fill them with sweets and gifts.
The fab thing about these little boxes is they can be hung on the Christmas tree, on a wall garland or displayed in a row on the mantelpiece, plus, you can re-use them year after year. Chouette! – Ellie

The bell jar obsession

There’s an atmosphere of slight hysteria in the office today. It might have something to do with the arrival of a scratch ‘n’ sniff Yankee Candle press release (low-lights include  ’Strawberry Buttercream’ and ‘Tutti-Frutti’…), or perhaps it’s the news that two of the most lovely home brands, Farrow & Ball and Jo Malone, are teaming up to launch an exciting new collection next week? (We’ll keep you posted!) Then again, perhaps it’s the thought of today’s annual Cath Kidston sample sale that’s getting us all a bit over-excited. For me though, it’s bell jars that are floating my boat today…

Whether it’s ogling the gorgeous bell jar displays in London’s hippest Shoreditch shops, Comfort Station and Caravan, or staring longingly at the stunning pages of Australian stylist Sibella Court’s new book Etcetera (which has just landed on my desk. Hurrah, hurrah! Hopefully we’ll show some pics on here soon – it’s due out in April in the UK. For now, check out her shop The Society Inc for a flavour or click here for a preview…), I seem to be surrounded by glass domes filled with curious objets…and I’m hooked! This all ties in with the current vogue for dark romanticism, macabre Victoriana drama and dusty museum display cases – something we’ve discussed before. All very Darwin. All very Gothic. All very dead. Of course, you don’t have to fill your bell jar with beady-eyed taxidermy or creepy skeletons…dried hydrangeas, vintage silk ballet pumps and mercury glass candlesticks would all look lovely. Or you could always opt for a little china bird. For reasonably-priced bell jars, see yesterday’s hot shop, Dee Puddy (£22 for a large 30cm one), Hibbitt, or Crocus. If you can wait until springtime, we spotted a fab little glass bell jar in the new Sainsbury’s spring/summer 2010 collection for just £7.99! Bargainous, to be sure. Of course, garden cloche bell jars DO look a bit like boobs, and they don’t come with bases – but a glass cake plate does the trick. Vintage lab bell jars with bases are REALLY expensive, even on eBay, tragically.

Here’s a cute bell jar pic from The Guardian to add yet more fuel to my bell-jar-obsession fire! I really can’t stop thinking about bell jars. Perhaps I’m actually losing the plot. Or maybe I’m just high on ‘Tutti Frutti’ scratch ‘n’ sniff…– Ellie

EXCLUSIVE: New 2010 bed linen

This lovely image just appeared in my inbox and cheered me up on this windy, grey November day. It shows some new REN bed linen from House of Fraser’s spring/summer 2010 collection – all very floral, and all very pretty.

This picture has also confirmed a few things that I have suspected for a while now: Firstly, that the white IKEA four-poster Edland bed frame looks very cool without any curtains/sheets draped on it. And secondly, that making a collage feature wall of gorgeous wallpaper samples CAN work. There’s a cool location house with this sort of collage effect, which I’ve spotted in hundreds of mags over the years. Here it is in Living Etc a while back:

I think as long as your other walls are white, and you choose the papers carefully, this can look lovely. It’s great if you just can’t decide which wallpaper to go for – and very cheap if you just use free sample sheets! – Ellie

Vintage seed labels fun

Burgundy Brocante is a new website – well worth a peep if you’re a crafty type, or a fan of all things vintage. As well as a nice selection of vintage home buys such as glass bottles, chairs and embroidered linens (all sourced in France) this little online shop also has a massive collection of original 1920s French seed envelope labels – just £6 for 24.

You could glue them on to small brown envelopes for storing seed, or use them to make gorgeous greeting cards, gift tags, or even frame them for some vintage wall art. I love the bright colours and pretty illustrations on these – and you can buy French seed packets too, with a label glued on the front and sowing instructions printed on the reverse. My ‘Chou’ one is so ‘chouette’!

Burgundy Brocante is run by David and Jane Gratton who live in the Burgundy region of France and spend their time hunting for lovely vintage bits and bobs. What a wonderful life! They’ve sold at antiques fairs for a few years, but have just launched their website, meaning we can all access these lovely labels now. Hurrah! – Ellie

Sneaky peek: SPRING 2010 WALLPAPERS

Big blooms are, well, BIG next season, so these stunning Japanese-style wallpapers from Superfresco Texture’s new spring/summer range at Graham and Brown are bang on trend. My favourite is the Eve design in pink, shown here in a lovely bedroom…

Having said that, it’s also gorgeous in grey, and at £30 a roll, you really can’t complain.

Also new is this elegant Poppy design, which looks fab in retro schemes. – Ellie

Curious Chocolate from the Bailey family

Sally and Mark Bailey’s 26-year-old son Ben has just launched his own business, Curious Chocolate. I’m salivating over the lovely website already – it basically combines two of my favourite things…old letterpress printing and chocolate!

Now, we rarely talk about food here, but the Baileys connection and the gorgeous packaging means I’m willing to sneak this in! Inspired by a trip to an old Amsterdam letterpress workshop, Ben Bailey’s chocolate bars come wrapped in graph paper covered with fabulous fonts – a typography lover’s dream come true! My favourite has got to be the ‘Mouthful’ mint bar – how appropriate for me.

The drinking chocolate in a rustic preserving jar would make a fabulous stocking filler, but it’s the jars of pretty chocolate-coated nuts and raisins that have caught my eye…they look like pebbles, eggs and olives! Very curious indeed!

All this talk of chocolate, and nothing but a lousy, dry and slightly squashed satsuma on my desk, which I have been ignoring for about a week now. Sigh. – Ellie

Macabre TREND: Victoriana drama

Skulls, insects, diagrams of horrific medical instruments, Victorian-style Darwin-esque etchings and Natural History sketches are all over the world of design at the moment. Let’s call this trend: Macabre. It’s dark. It’s gothic. It’s black. It’s creepy. Think of a dusty museum display case in the 1800s – full of spidery death and decay; skeletons, faded labels, stuffed birds with beady eyes, sad rows of dead butterflies, scientific diagrams of insects, plants and animals – all lifeless.

Has this dark romanticism got something to do with 2009 being the bi-centenary of Charles Darwin’s birth? Perhaps. But whatever the roots of this dark trend, I’m LOVING it all. RE, one of my favourite shops, has embraced it with relish, launching a whole new ‘Macabre’ collection, with vintage plates covered in skulls, eyes, snakes, scorpions, lizards, lobsters and spiders, as well as insect napkins.

Also, check out their ‘Esquire’ notebooks with sketches of lethal-looking barber’s and dentist’s tools as well as some less-scary brushes. Their ‘Gardener’ notebooks and ‘Cook’ books all feature similar Victorian etchings, too.

The recent revival of the glorious Pictorial Webster’s – A Visual Dictionary of Curiosities might have contributed to the current obsession with flora, fauna, and dead things sketched or etched…

Featuring over 1,500 engravings that originally graced the pages of Webster’s dictionaries in the 19th century, this chunky volume is absolutely fascinating. Meticulously cleaned and restored by fine-press bookmaker Johnny Carrera, the alphabetically-arranged engravings show everything from Acorns to Zebras, Bell Jars to Velocipedes – a Victorian list of ‘curiosities’. Crafting fans will be as excited as I am about the rubber stamp set that features these fantastic images…and the A-Z wall cards are CRYING out to be framed as wall art, or propped up in nurseries and designer offices…

These cute cards also tap into another trend we’re seeing emerge – the Alphabet trend – but let’s not complicate things with all that now!! Having a quick look for some high-street Macabre buys, I spotted a black skull candle in Paperchase, a skull cushion in Dwell, and some funky flock skull wallpaper from Barbara Hulanicki at Graham & Brown…

I’ve been a fan of the Victorian-style sketched jewellery at Paraphenalia for a while now, and it fits in with this look perfectly!

Let’s end with this pretty butterfly calendar from Anthropologie. Have a lovely, if a tad macabre, weekend. – Ellie

PLEASE vote for us! (intermission)

Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt this blog to BEG you, shamelessly, to please vote for us in the November Dorset Cereal’s Little Blog Awards. All you have to do is click on the link to the right, or indeed, click here to vote, and vote for HomeShoppingSpy in the Lifestyle category. We’d be so grateful. And, if you vote, you might even win youself a sack of muesli. Oh, the glamour! – Ellie

EXCLUSIVE: Supermarket cuckoo clock!

Well knock me down with a feather! This amazing cuckoo clock looks like a stylish and expensive designer item, but the good news is, it’s not. In fact, it’s from the spring/summer 2010 collection at…wait for it…drum roll…TESCO!

That’s right, folks. Supermarket-chic is moving in to a whole new realm of excitement next season…great news if you’re a ’style on a shoestring’ kinda gal like me! We’ve been sessioning the spring/summer press shows this week, and there are lots of exciting things on the horizon, but I just had to share this sneaky peek with you today! It’s due to hit Tesco Direct in March, for just £45. – Ellie

Bonfire night lanterns

Throw a fireworks party and fill your home and garden with pretty paper lanterns for a cosy glow…

These lovely paper fairylights from Blueberry Park can be personalised with your own words or patterns – great for weddings, birthdays and children’s rooms.

I love the ‘tea & cakes’ idea – sweet at any time of year. I wish I could tell you that I’m having a lovely fireworks party tonight with twinkling lanterns, hot pumpkin soup and roasted chestnuts… but the reality is that I’ll be doing the same thing I do every year – standing in a crowded park, dodging sparklers, eating a cheap hot dog (and half the paper napkin too probably, in the dark) and wishing I’d remembered my gloves!

If you are having a party, these flying lanterns from Cox and Cox are fabulous for a striking display.  – Ellie