Happy Halloween

Happy Halloween everyone !!!!! 

via

What do you have planned for this evening? 

The Dorothy Days Xxx

 

A busy week so far...and fog....lots of fog!

Hello everyone :) ,

Hope that you have been having a great week so far. I feel like I have got lots done this week already :) ! On Sunday I am going to Bath Vintage Market so I have been busy preparing. I have been carefully wrapping up tea cups for the journey, making more jewellery, labelling items and just making sure I have everything ready. Really excited about going. If anyone is in or near Bath at the weekend please be sure to come, the vintage market is great fun. There are lots of amazing stalls with vintage and handmade items and sells everything from clothes to records and from vintage furniture to Dorothy Days tea cups!!! For anyone interested it is held at Green Park Station :).

Via

This week I have been waking up early so that I can try and get as much fitted into my day as possible! It is really strange waking up when its still quite dark outside and this week it has been extra strange as England has been covered in a very thick fog. In the mornings with the winter light and thick fog there has been an almost magical feel where everything that looked familiar suddenly looks rather strange and new .... its a little bit like when it snows :)

Here are some photos from the BBC sent in by readers to show the fog which we have been having this week in the U.K

Click here to see !

and here is the latest weather forecast for the U.K taken from the MET office.. I thought it might make some of my followers who live in sunnier climates laugh!

Hope you all have been having a good week so far. What has the weather been like in your part of the world ?

The Dorothy Days x

Quote of the Week- C.S Lewis

Hello everyone and happy Monday :)

Thought I would kick the week off with another inspirational quote. Thank you everyone who has shared their favourite quotes in the comment section below, it has been lovely to hear all your comments and discover some new quotes. Please keep them coming, I shall feature the best ones on my blog as the quote of the week.

This week the quote was chosen by Catalin from Asian Rose Designs. (Thank you!!!)
I really love this quote and thought it was a lovely positive quote to get this week started and to be uplifting as the weather has been rather gloomy here in the UK.


You are never too old to set another goal or dream another dream." C.S. Lewis

What is your favourite quote?

Have a great week :) ! 
The Dorothy Days Xx 

5 things that made me smile this weekend.

Hello everyone :)

I hope that you are all having a wonderful weekend. It has been wet and rainy and miserable here in the U.K and has been getting dark so early in the evening too....winter is deffinatly here but despite the weather I have been having a wonderful weekend :) !

On Saturday my mum came to stay and we went out for a girls shopping day. I treated myself and bought the most beautiful new shoes.....I am rather in love with them (I promise I will upload some photos soon)! I also visited an art gallery to view some of the photography work. The work was absolutely beautiful and I really enjoyed myself :). That evening we sat down and had cheese and wine, pate and crackers and delicious onion bread while we caught up. Was a great day.

Today I have had much more of a lazy day inside, I love lazy Sundays and to make myself not feel so bad about having a really lazy day I did some paperwork in the afternoon so I feel ready for next week :) !!

I thought I would share with you 5 things that made me smile this weekend....

1) My mum visiting :) !

2) Beautiful new shoes that I just can't wait to wear!

3) Visiting art galleries is one of my favourite things to do so always puts a big smile on my face

4) This weekend in the middle of town a mans umbrella blew inside out....instead of wrestling with it and trying to put it down he started to dance and leap around in 'singing in the rain' style!!! Was hilarious :), I love when people don't take themselves too seriously.

5) I came across Nail Rock this weekend which is a designer nail wrap company. They have the most amazing designs that are so imaginative... here are some of my favourite. Be sure to check them out  by clicking the link above :). Both images below are taken from their new blog.

 

 These 'Bee in My Bonnet' nails are amazing, I love the little wings.

Nails couldn't get any chic-er than this!!! via

Hope you all had a great weekend

The Dorothy Days

Things my followers love about where they live

Hello everyone,

I posted a little while ago about my favourite things about living in the English countryside and asked to hear what you guys love about where you are from. I had some wonderful responses from lots of different places around the world, was really lovely to read all the responses. Thanks so much for sharing and I thought I would share a few here:

Zoe from stone tree jewelry said:
I'm in a rather rural part of the United States in the gorgeous state of Maine. It's fall foliage season here and we had our first wood fire weeks ago. Not for everyone, but I love it! :)

One of my favourite things about Autumn is coming inside slighty chilly and warming up infront of a lovely log fire so I was so glad that Zoe posted this as some of the things she loves most about where she lives.


Grace left me this lovely reply:

I live in a rural part of California's Gold Country and we are enjoying Indian Summer, still in the 90's here this week and tomorrow is October! I love this time of year, just before the Fall season kicks in. The trees are already turning and things are settling in, with the squirrels bustling about, the birds are especially happy and enjoying the birdbath daily. It is fun to watch them take turns. Mama deer and 2 of her triplets came through the yard last evening, and I am sure #3 was nearby.
The weather is mild enough that my hubby and I enjoy our back porch in the evenings after sundown.
I enjoy hearing about your country life too - Life is Good!

Can't believe its still in the 90s over there!!! WOW!! The last few days weeks here in the U.K have been rain, rain and more rain and quite cold so I am really jealous! Having a deer family visit  must be amazing, we do have deer up the back of the garden which leads into the woods but they very rarely venture down close enough to the house for me to get a good look. I usually see them while driving home at night along the country roads.

Jayne from handmadecuties said:

 Hmmm...I loved where I used to live and I'm settled where I live now. Sleeping with the windows wide open, the sound of bull frogs at night, the cool morning air are the things I miss most about my old home.

These are the things that I like most about where I now live...
*I can make a quick trip to the grocery store a couple minutes away.
*Although traffic is bad, I get to cut off the freeway and reach my home without getting stuck in the really horrendous traffic.
*I, at least, have a little fenced in back yard for my dog to run around.
*The inside of our home has a great set-up with lots of space.
*I have a garden.

I think I want to move now...Can I come and live with you?

Living more in town must have its perks as well, I am slightly less rural now than I used to be but it used to be a 24 mile round trip just to get to the supermarket which was a bit of a nightmare if you forgot anything!!!

I will feature the rest of the replies in my next blog post and if anyone else would like to add what they love about where they live I would love to hear from you too :), please leave me a message in the comment section below and let me know where you live and why you love it :)

Thanks again for all my lovely comments, I really love reading them and so interesting to hear about where you all come from. Makes me want to do loads of travelling and see all these different places!

Have a great weekend

The Dorothy Days Xx

Ophelia by Millias from the Pre Raphaelite Brotherhood

Hello everyone,

I have been thinking about my blog quite a bit recently and have decided that along with my regular features I want to do some more personal blog posts. I really want to start blogging about things I really love and I am passionate about so you can get to know a little bit more about me :). So far you probably know that I am rather obssessed with vintage and I am more than a little addicted to tea!  Something that you might not know about me is that I am an Art Historian! I studied the History of Art/ Art History at degree level and art is one of my biggest passions. I often post art based links on my Facebook page but it is not something I speak that much about on my blog. I spend lots of my time going to galleries and exhibitions and seeing works of art up close in the flesh so I thought I would share with you all some of my passion for art and some of my favourite artworks by writing a short piece about each. I hope that you shall enjoy these posts and also learn a little bit too :). Would love to hear what some of your favourite art works are :).

To kick things off I thought I would start with Ophelia (1851- 52) which is a work by Sir John Everett Millais who was part of the Pre Raphaelite Brotherhood. The brotherhood was founded by Millais, Rosetti and Hunt and rejected the popular Renaissance style of painting in favour of work Pre Raphael hence the name of the group, The Pre Raphaelite Brotherhood. There is a big exhibition on the Pre Raphaelites at the moment in England at the TATE gallery so I thought this would be a good place to start. I am really excited to be visiting the exhibition in a few weeks time. Has anyone been to see it yet?

This painting is one of extreme beauty but also sadness. Ophelia is a character taken from Shakespeare's Hamlet who drowns herself in the stream. This painting is one of the most prized in TATE Britain and was given to the nation by Sir Henry Tate who made his fortune from sugar. The painting has been beautifully painted with an incredible amount of detail. Millias believed that every element of the painting should be painted with the same importance so the flowers in the background are as beautifully and delicately executed as Ophelias face and body. The river in the painting is in Surrey, England and was painted on site by Millais so that he could get all the details correct. Ophelia was then painted in his studio. The colours in this painting are so beautiful and luminous due to the new colours which were avaliable around this period because of the advances in technology particually in the production of chemicals needed to make these brighter more vibrant colours.

Hope you enjoyed this small intro to this work :) . Please let me know if you would like more infomation on the paintings in my future posts or if that was the right amount :)

The Dorothy Days

The Dorothy Days' Quote of the Week- Thomas Merton

Hello everyone and happy Monday :) !

I hope that you have all had a wonderful and restful weekend and are ready to start the new week!

My quote of the week this week is by Thomas Merton. One of my biggest passions is art so I really love this quote and think there is a lot of truth in it.

“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”Thomas Merton.

Do you have a favourite quote which you would like to see featured? I always love to hear new quotes which I have never heard before so please share with me in my comment section below.

The Dorothy Days X

Inspirational Quote of the week : George Eliot

“It is never too late to be what you might have been.”

- Mary Anne Evans (Under the pen name of George Eliot) 

Mary Anne Evans/ George Eliot (1819-1880) was a English novelist who was one of the leading writers of the Victorian era.  

Hope that you all have a great week.

The Dorothy Days