My Love For Vintage

I can honestly say I never thought I would write a blog post about style. Although I wouldn't say I dress badly, I would never claim to know anything about fashion. That said, I suppose I do have my own styles that I like and one of those is everything and anything to do with vintage clothing. I'm a sucker for a vintage shop/fair, even if I don't buy anything. To be honest, I don't usually buy anything! But, while in Manchester last weekend I walked past the cutest of vintage shops. Usually it's just my luck that the item I want is in the window and this was no exception! We walked away from it to begin with but when we stopped just round the corner I dragged Alex back to check it out with me. It was a great shop full of treasures, I was so engrossed I didn't take any pictures! Booooo :( Well, it was called Retro Rehab and after finding their website here's a few pictures from there to show you what it was like.

Review: Red's True BBQ

It's restaurant review time! As I was chatting to a friend the other day about this blog, she suggested blogging about my restaurant adventures and the many delicious photos that you can see down my instagram. So I'm taking her advice (thank you, Georgia!) and here's my first.

On a side note, Georgia is a blogger herself and throughout trying to start this one, her blog has been both my motivation and inspiration to make this one as good as possible! Be sure to check out her awesome blog, mappedout.

Back to food. This was a restaurant in Manchester, but there are branches in Headingley, Leeds and Nottingham. I was surprised (and seriously upset) to not see London! If anyone from Red's sees this, please tell me whyyyyyyy?! I would actually suggest a trip to Manchester just for this restaurant. Meat lovers only. It's one of those glorious places that puts ingredients together that makes most go ergh and makes me go, take my money please.

The restaurant itself is styled with many church related items, including confession box toilets, 'the good book' menus, which includes the 10 commandments, and 'praise for' sauces. This place is literally for the worshipper of meat. However the actual restaurant has a more trendy feel and has less church related decor, but it still looks awesome! Find more pictures on their website.

Weekend Away In Manchester

It feels like ages since I last posted! It has been over a week, but I have been doing a little bit of housekeeping over the past couple of days and I also had a weekend away over the bank holiday. I'm a Essex/London girl, so I was quite excited to visit Manchester. I've never been there before and I felt it was a good city to explore! Me and Alex have some friends who live up there now, so we did a little visiting and had a nice explore around too! There's loads I want to talk about, so I'm going to split it up into a couple of posts so they're easier to find :)

Manchester is a really interesting city, there are loads of places to eat and drink and because its actually pretty small you can walk everywhere! We had loads of great food, and I'll be sharing a few of those too! We were also lucky enough to catch the opening of Home. It brings together a gallery, theatre, cinema and lots of different events into one big.. well, home. Check out their website here. They had a street party to celebrate the opening and it was a lot of fun!

Key Lime Tarts. Sort Of.

Dessert anyone?

I didn't really know what to call this post. The recipe for this dessert is from a blog called Nutritionist in the Kitch and she rightly calls them Key Lime Tarts. But, when I was making this recipe I realised I pretty much had nothing in that the recipe called for. However, I did have a lot of things that I thought I could substitute. So, I thought, why not?! I like the idea of making up my own recipes and I suppose this is the place to start, learning to substitute! I didn't really realise that I couldn't call them key lime tarts until Alex come home and after telling him about my fun making them, he reminded me there is no lime in them. Oops.

Kiwi tarts makes me feel like I'm lying, because the only kiwi is what you see on top. I'm open to ideas here..

Find the original recipe here.

Orrrrrr, follow mine! Oo, exciting!!! Here goes..

Here's a nice picture to get you interested.

Homemade Chicken & Mushroom Ramen

Time for a recipe I think! As stated before, I don't usually make up my own recipes, so will always give credit to where I get them from.

This particular recipe is from an awesome blog called Fork Knife Swoon. I absolutely love her stuff, very simple and usually pretty quick. It is usually my boyfriend that makes this recipe, but last night I decided to have a go. It didn't come out as he usually does it, so I'll be asking him whether he does anything different! I followed the recipe in half (because there was only one of me last night).

Find the original recipe & instructions here.

Here's the ingredients I used:

A Rainy Day

All it's done today is rain! So it's been a pretty boring one really. Done three loads of washing, made pasta (I did not remember to get the chicken out early enough, so I had bacon pasta), tidied up a little. Not much really! I have however redesigned this here blog. Considering no-one has seen it yet anyway, no-one will know that, so I feel I had to say it! I don't feel particularly good at this, so yesterday I found a pretty flower pattern and just changed some of the fonts/colours to suit my likes. It was very pretty, quite pink and not at all like my personality really! Although it looked nice, it didn't represent me at all. I usually go for something much more minimal, but I feel like playing around with this a little. So now, as you'll see if you read this before I change it again, it has a bicycle background and is mostly blueish (this colour is my favourite) so it feels a little more like my blog. I was trying to sort a few of the pages out. I think I'm thinking of this more like a website? I feel there needs to be different pages for each of the different things that I'll post. Like, one page for recipes, one for bicycles, one for handmade stuff etc. But I thought, well what will be on the home page then? I've done a bit of blog research and found that no one does that and it is more of a everything goes on the homepage sort of thing. The difference is usually they're talking about the same thing all the time, like beauty or food, whereas I'm just dabbing in everything. Oh well! This is me, so I'll just put it all out there. It has made me think about the archive over on the right though, if that's the only way to find stuff, I need to name my posts very well! It feels a bit all over the place to me, but I want to really give this a try! Anyway, that was my day! Interesting, huh? Just smile and nod..

First Post - A Hello and Introduction

This is a blog.

Blogging is something I've always wanted to try, but never quite been brave enough to do it properly! I always felt as if it was something for experts and you had to know everything to do it. Now I'm about to graduate from university (eeeeek!) I thought, why not? I have tried before on tumblr and on wordpress, but neither went very well. I didn't like the structure of the websites more than anything, so hopefully this will be better.

I've been studying marketing and advertising, so I feel this should come pretty naturally.. That's what I'm hoping anyway!

So, what will this blog be about? To be honest, I haven't decided yet. I've always thought of doing a sort of 'thought piece/diary' blog where I can just ramble on and not even worry if anyone is actually reading it. So that's how I'm going to start! I'll just talk about something. Anything. Just to get going.