Pictures

One of the (many!) problems with having moved house as often as we have (seven times in ten years) is that we’ve gotten pretty good at living and therefore moving, with not a lot of stuff. This may not seem like a problem, but it means we lack a lot of the things that can make a home feel like home.

Like pictures!

Just over a year ago, I bought a lovely print from Eloise Renouf on Etsy. It’s A3 sized and I thought it would go beautifully in the craft room which we had painted yellow:

Ever since then it has stayed in its tube – we haven’t made a trip to IKEA to buy a frame and there were no others locally I liked. Terrible, right?

On Thursday we wandered over to the nearby suburb of Chapel Allerton and visited a newly opened independent store called Chirpy. It stocks goods from local and other UK indies from fabrics, to baby goods and… pictures! We dithered for ages over which ones to buy and couldn’t pick just one, so eventually purchased two.

We bought two lovely prints by a local artist called Caroline Pratt. Each of them is part of a numbered series and signed. They also came framed which meant one less job before hanging them yesterday!

The first one as you can see nearest the camera is one of foxes:

Apparently I’m the fox on the right and Trev is the fox on the left 🙂

Here’s print number two:

I love this one because of the owl – which is very appropriate to someone living in Leeds and will remind me of having lived here once we leave later this year (yeah – I probably need to go into more detail about that some other time) to hopefully move a bit further out into the country.

So where does this leave my lonely cloud print? Well it just so happens that the lovely Harriet who runs Chirpy, uses the exact IKEA frame I was after for some of the prints she sells in-store and kindly agreed to sell me one! So, only a year after purchasing, my I Love Clouds is framed:

It now hangs very happily, above Grace in her table, in the craft room – where the other two prints also reside:

It’s amazing the difference owning a few bits and pieces like this can make. Oddly enough I don’t the extra effort it might take to pack them come moving time 🙂