My hands are tied, tied to you

Whew, the last few weeks have been a bit of a whirlwind. I found out about two weeks ago that I'd managed to get two interviews for PGCE placements (through School Direct if you happen to be in the know with all things education these days...) so every spare second I've had has been dedicated to lesson planning, interview prep and shopping for an outfit that was smart but still 'me' enough that I felt comfortable in it. The hard work is finally over, I had my two interviews on consecutive days this week (two full on days of being on show was pretty exhausting!) and thankfully now don't even have to think about going to the interview at my third school in February now as MY FAVOURITE OFFERED ME A PLACE!

 As of September, you can officially call me Miss. I'm hugely excited and absolutely bloomin' terrified all at once.

dress: New Look, jacket: Topshop, socks: Topshop, boots: Topshop

My housemate took these outfit snaps for me a few weekends back now, it feels like a luxury to finally have the time to do something with them! The dress is one of my new faves, partially due to the fact I didn't even have to leave my desk to buy it. One of my colleagues was telling me about how she was having to take a dress back for her daughter on her way home from work, ended up showing me it and somehow 30 seconds later I found myself running into the loos with it to try on and instantly deciding that it needed a place in my wardrobe. The only negative about the whole experience (aside from the fact I appear to have started buying unwanted clothes off a 15 year old...) was then nipping to the cash machine to get the money out to pay for the dress and watching my bank card being eaten by the machine. I think the machine was trying to prove a point that accidentally shopping at work was a bad habit to get into. 

Get Away- Circa Waves

Maybe I'm wasting my young years

As usual, I've had a very cake filled Sunday with another Iron Cupcake competition- Death by Chocolate was the theme this month and even though I only managed to sneak a few little slithers of cake after the judges had passed their verdict (it was a very busy one this month!) I still felt like I was going to end up in a sugar coma. I'll probably do a post about it soon as if you happened to see my instagram feed earlier then you'll know there were some awesome designs amongst the entries!

Other than that, this weekend I had a pretty lazy one after a night out on Friday with some of my favourites. I wore my new favourite dress which made for lots of fun swishy dancing- great entertainment to liven things up since what has been my favourite club night for years was sadly lacking in any sort of atmosphere. I think I need to find a new favourite indie venue to satisfy my Dad-dancing needs. As well as buying myself a new dress, I'm having a bit of a jewellery buying phase (yes, I have added another moustache to my ever expanding collection... considering founding a moustacheaholics anonymous group if anyone cares to join me). I'd been hunting for a K watch for ages after seeing almost every other letter in Topshop. After months of trying I decided getting a T was the next best option, teamed with my scrabble ring it spells out my initials quite nicely.

dress: Topshop, shirt: Forever 21, shoes: Primark, scrabble ring: Vintage fair, watch: Topshop, bracelet: c/o Haus of Deck, moustache ring: c/o Haus of Deck

Hope you've all had a good weekend!

Wasting My Young Years: London Grammar

Is your bed made? Is your sweater on?

Yesterday was an incredibly jam-packed day of fun with one of my new housemates. We started off the day with a pretty impressive run (I definitely can run further than I thought- it just took a running buddy to give me the motivation to push myself a little further) followed by a hilarious game of tennis in our local park- I'm not sure you could really call it tennis when we spent 90% of the game running after the ball after missing our shots. We decided to leave on a high when we'd managed to get over 10 successful consecutive hits going...I'm embarrassed to admit how long that took!  

Later on, we took a trip into town via the magical world of Hobbycraft to buy some green food colouring paste for the baking we had been plotting for the evening (I'll post about it soon and the reasoning for the green paste will be revealed!). We couldn't resist refuelling before heading back into town with a quick brownie pit-stop at one of my favourite cafes, Out of The Woods in Granary Wharf, as we passed- we'd definitely earned it after all of our exercise earlier in the morning! 

A few hours of shopping later (I seemed to get most of mine done in the time my housemate spent buying a new phone- I'd like to think I'm a speedy shopper but in reality it just showed how long phone shopping takes!) and we headed home just as the rain began to pour- thankfully it held off for most of the day as you can see from the photos below I'd been a tad optimistic with my bare legs (I'm just determined to get as much wear out of my sandals as I can before Autumn creeps back in!). 

Hope you're all enjoying your weekends too!

dress: (c/o) Clothing at Tesco, belt: Topshop, shoes: Topshop, necklace: River Island

Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa- Vampire Weekend

Tell me what it is that you wanna be

necklace: Urban Outfitters, jacket: Republic, dress: Topshop, converse: Schuh

One of the few shops I can tolerate at sale time is Urban Outfitters, particularly when it comes to rifling through their gorgeous jewellery. However, my mission to find cheap jewellery went a little bit wrong when I found this necklace nestled amongst all of the sale stuff without a sale sticker on it. Giving them the benefit of the doubt that one of the sales advisors had just forgotten to mark this one down I took it to the till to check the price because I didn't particularly want to pay full price for it. But apparently I did actually like it enough to pay £18 because when the girl at the till offered to put it back for me I practically threw my bank card at her shouting "It's ok, I'll buy it anyway". I'm great at sales shopping.

Also, if you haven't heard it being played on Radio 1 this week, then check out the song below by Swim Deep. They'd been floating around for quite a while in 2012 and I've become a little bit obsessed. It looks like they're set for big things this year :)

The Sea- Swim Deep

We turn our hopes to this figure alone

dress: Topshop, necklace: River Island, tights: Gap, socks: Topshop, boots: Office

My room at home is really not great for taking pictures. Especially not when there was only a tiny patch of floor not covered by my gigantic suitcase and numerous other bags of stuff that I was just too lazy to find a real home for. But still, the only part of me that you're missing out on in these photos is my knees, and quite frankly they're not all that interesting to look at anyway. 

I've had this dress for months now and it barely has time to come out of the washing machine wash before its found its way back into my washing basket after being worn yet again. Particularly when  I was at home and had a limited wardrobe, this dress got to go on lots of little outings from my cousin's birthday party to the pub on Christmas eve and countless other places in between. Luckily my Mum constantly seems to have the washing machine going so she could keep up with me and the dress.

I went shopping in Liverpool after Christmas with my Mum to take back a few things and have a little wander. I'm really not a fan of sales shopping in the slightest (I think years of working in Next and being traumatised by the sales there scarred me for life) but I'm pretty proud of myself for finding these boots in Office down to £20, and as my work shoes are currently developing a nice little hole in the toe area I think these were long overdue. Its a good job my Mum's shoelace needed tying so she wandered over to the shoe concessions in Topshop to sit down and sort herself out, otherwise I'd never have found these and would no doubt still be walking into work wearing holey shoes on Monday. 

Hope you all had a lovely New Year and have a great 2013. 

Milk- Theme Park

A beautiful sight, we're happy tonight

dress, top (underneath), jumper: Topshop

Hope you all had a wonderful Christmas! Mine was a quiet affair but still very enjoyable and full of food (naturally...) so I'm currently finding that 90% of the clothes I brought home with me are currently redundant- not sure what possessed me to bring home a load of body con and tight fitted clothes to wear over Christmas. Madness. 

Here's a few quick snaps of my Christmas Day dress courtesy of Mama T (does anybody else have a little family tradition of a new outfit for Christmas too?). I love the speckled fabric on this dress, and being me I've teamed it with my trusty collared top (I do own alternatives, honest, but never seem to bother to photograph those!) and the old favourite burgundy jumper even made an appearance when it came to braving the great outdoors for a post-dinner walk/waddle.

I've been on a few pretty muddy wanders with my family over the last week, but silly Kaz has had a few camera related incidents of late- forgotten memory card, no battery, forgotten to take the camera out altogether- so I didn't get to capture any of the lovely wintery days, instead being able to give my full attention to not falling over in the muddy swamps my Dad insisted on us wading through.

We are the reckless, we are the wild youth

dress: Topshop

I realised when I uploaded these photos just how blurry they really are. I'd like to blame this on something that was no fault of my own but in actual fact I think the cause is just that I get too swishy and overexcited when I put this dress on because of the floaty material and voluminous sleeves. Not going to lie, this dress makes me prance around and pretend I'm Florence. Although as far as I'm concerned, that's never a bad thing.

I've had this dress since the start of my final year of Uni so its pretty old now (like me, sob sob) but it has remained my failsafe go to outfit for nights out, meals out and anything inbetween ever since. I'm sure everybody I know is pretty sick of it by now, but quite frankly I think I'll still be wearing it when I'm forty. Unless I keep consuming pop tarts at the alarming rate I currently am (I only discovered them quite recently so am making up for lost time...) in which case I'll have probably outgrown the dress by Christmas.