Pink Julep Loves: Monique Lhuillier Charms Espresso Cups

Photo Credit: http://shop.moniquelhuillier.com

I love this adorable set of two espresso cups by Monique Lhuillier! The set is $130.00 which is a little steep, but what a fabulous gift for someone special who's getting married, having a house-warming or just needs a good present! Get it here!

London Apartment

We put a reservation on an apartment for our first 3 months in London a couple of months ago and it's a huge weight off my shoulders, knowing we'll have somewhere to stay when we arrive and that we won't be in a hotel, moving every five minutes until we get settled. We'll be staying in a lovely apartment in this building, West Kensington Court.



When we first started looking into a place to live in London, it was getting very frustrating. Certain parts of renting work differently there than here or the US or at least in my experience. For example, you're required to pay your rent by direct debit, meaning you need a bank account, which is something else we won't be able to get until we get there... you can see the frustration. So I decided to start searching for Holiday Rentals, which are basically apartments owned by people who rent them out short-term for people who'd rather stay in a proper flat as opposed to a hotel. It's usually much cheaper than a comparable hotel as well. We managed to get a pretty good deal since we'll be in the flat for 3 whole months and the rent includes all the utitilities and taxes. It's still more expensive than what we'd pay for a normal lease, but for the increase, I'm very relieved that we're totally sorted from arrival through the Christmas holidays, giving us plenty of time to find a wonderful more permanent apartment after we get there!

The decor wouldn't have been my first choice by far, but the leather furniture looks nice and the apartment is quite cute, with all the amenities we'd want!

The couch folds out into a hide-a-bed, which is handy. I doubt that we'll have guests right away, but it's possible that my MIL could come over for a week or two, so at least we'd have somewhere to put her.

There's a cute little dining table... not much, but it will do for 3 months.

The bedroom is okay... when we were looking, believe it or not, we saw much worse for more money! We'll each have a little closet (VERY LITTLE - EEK!) and it's nice that there's a little desk. We'll probably bring or buy our own bedding... I like my own bed stuff... creeps me out to sleep on someone else's sheets!

I'm very happy that there's a bathtub!!! A lot of people in Europe don't have bathtubs! None of my in-laws do nor did any of the homes I visited in England in 2003. So I'm very pleased that this one has a tub so I can pop over to the nearest LUSH for a bathbomb and get back to taking baths frequently as I did when I lived in NYC! I love a good bubble bath!

Cute kitchen.

All photos from www.holidaylettings.co.uk

View from the window inside the flat. It's lovely!

The apartment is rather small, but I think from my limited experience of travelling abroad that rooms and flats are smaller in parts of Europe. It's changing and don't get me wrong, there are huge homes with tall ceilings as there are anywhere, but most of the accomodations are definitely different that what us Southern girls from US are used to. So I'm going to have a good attitude about it and see how they do things on the other side of the pond! I'm nervous and scared, but so excited as well that I nearly can't stand it!!! Also, West Kensington is a great area right in the thick of London! I think it's the perfect place to start... at least I hope it is!

A Cool Treat for Summer!

Walmart.com

I saw these Prepara volcano popsicle molds on Divine Caroline and they are a genius idea! The middle is hollow so the pops can be filled with whatever you want including whipped cream, pudding, fruit or my personal favorite... booz! Screwdriver ice lolly anyone?

Manic Monday Random Post

As many of you know, I'm starting a new job today! I couldn't be more excited to re-enter the work force! As it turns out, house wifery just isn't for me, but I've had a nice long break which was good! I'm so excited to get back into the swing of things! I chose my nail polish for my first day last night. I decided on OPI Get Me to the Taj on Time. It's a lovely light pink color and very neutral. It seemed appropriate last night since it was our 2 year anniversary and I wore this color for our wedding!

I got this adorable card from a friend in the mail. I just had to share a photo! She's a great pal and believe it or not, I met her through Twitter and she'd been reading my blog all along. The internet is powerful these days, I tell ya!

I decided to try this last week. It's an ironing water that you put into your iron as you would with regular tap water. It makes your clothes smell good and it prevents lime scale deposits, which I'd been having trouble with in my iron. The lime scale was coming out when I used the steam and I ruined one of my favorite tops. I really like Comfort Vaporess Ironing water, but when I first got it and read the directions, I realized I would need to descale my iron.

This is a photo taken on a white towel I used to descale the iron with. These kinds of spots came out of the iron all over this towel. It's so gross! I don't know if this is a problem for those of you in the US, but if you're living in England, I'd highly recommend descaling your iron with Scale Away and using Comfort Vaporess Ironing Water! The descaling took me about an hour, but it was worth it and now my iron works perfectly!

I hope you all had a wonderful weekend! I'm off now to join the working class!

Pink Julep Gets Ready as Inspired by How to Walk in High Heels by Camilla Morton

I'm currently reading How to Walk in High Heels by Camilla Morton and being only on page 10, I can already tell this is going to be a go to book for the self-improvement of Pink Julep behavior for the rest of my life! This book is fabulous so far, not only telling me things I already know because my mother tried to beat them into my brain, but reminding me to stop being lazy about certain things that simply MUST be done!

The book starts by addressing "getting ready" which is a problem for most women I know. There's never enough time, it never works out right and it's not always the happy experience we'd like it to be, leaving us stressed and let's face it, perhaps a little haggard on our way out the door, when we should be our freshest and most fabulously ready to face the day!

One of the first thing that struck me was how Morton talks about setting up your getting ready space. Now I'm always on the quest for the proper organization of closet, drawers and make-up bag to make things easier as I'm sure we all are, but Morton goes the extra mile recommending that you establish a "mood" in your getting ready space. She recommends Diptyque candles (pictured above) for scent. She also recommends that if you're a person who requires music, to go for classical, jazz or soothing music as tunes that are too raucous might distract you and delay your process, therefore making you late.

To translate this into my life, I'm using Mixture Soy Hand Poured Candles in Wild Currant. Let's face it, the shopping here in Cayman is limited so Diptyque isn't really an option, nor am I thrilled with the price tag of such luxuries, but Mixture candles are amazing, luxurious and smell amazing!

For music, I'm not really much of a classical in the morning gal. I used to always listen to music when I got ready growing up and somehow I've stopped. Classical, jazz or soothing would just prompt me to get right back in bed, but I do agree with Morton that something too loud or crazy might up the tension of an already stressful morning ritual. Here is the playlist I've come up with to try out (on shuffle of course) for the rest of the week:

1. Dreaming - Blondie
2. Leave the Bourbon on the Shelf - The Killers
3. Beautiful Ones - Suede
4. Dancin With Myself - Billy Idol
5. Smile - Lily Allen
6. I Gotta Feelin - The Black Eyed Peas
7. Bubbly - Colby Caillet
8. Clocks - Coldplay
9. Put Your Records On - Corrine Bailey Rae
10. Friday I'm In Love - The Cure
11. She - Elvis Costello
12. Love Story - Taylor Swift
13. Linda Goes to Mars - John Prine
14. High & Dry - Jamie Cullum
15. I'm Yours - Jason Mraz
16. Glamorous Indie Rock & Roll - The Killers
17. Papparazzi - Lady Gaga
18. Killing the Blues - John Prine
19. Bleeding Love - Leona Lewis
20. LDN - Lily Allen
21. Sunday Girl - Blondie
22. The Climb - Miley Cyrus
23. I Get a Kick Out of You - Jamie Cullum
24. In the Summertime - Mungo Jerry
25. Unwritten - Natasha Beddingfield
26. Wonderwall - Oasis
27. Hey There Delilah - Plain White T's
28. I Love You Till the End - The Pogues
29. Just Like Heaven - The Cure
30. Brass in Pocket - The Pretenders
31. Hello Mary Lou (Goodbye Heart) - Queen
32. Christmas in Prison - John Prine
33. Crazy Little Thing Called Love - Queen
34. Run - Snow Patrol
35. Party in the USA - Miley Cyrus
36. Downtown - Petula Clark
37. For Once in My Life - Stevie Wonder
38. Eh, Eh (Nothing Else I Can Say) - Lady Gaga
39. The Ballad of Michael Valentine - The Killers
40. You Belong With Me - Taylor Swift
41. Big Sur - The Thrills
42. Don't Look Back in Anger - Oasis
43. Sabu Visits the Twin Cities - John Prine
44. American Girl - Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers
45. Someone Like You - Van Morrison

The playlist is just a rough draft... I can already tell it's going to need some tweaking, but we'll see.

Morton also focuses on having enough time, so I'm also going to try to get up earlier which will be the most difficult part I fear.

What do you do to personalize your getting ready space? If you have tips you'd care to share, I'd love to hear them!

xoxo,
Pink Julep!

Out With the Old, In With the New!

Our friends are hosting a little event in a few weeks. It's like a swap, buy and sell. Everyone is bringing a bunch of stuff they don't want anymore and all items will be priced at $1 each. We can all buy and sell each other's stuff and then the proceeds will be donated to the Cayman Islands Humane Society! This seems like a really great opportunity to unload some of the crap in our house we're never going to use! So I've been purging all day. We're off today in celebration of the Queen's Birthday, which is actually in April, but regardless, God bless her and her birthday cause it's a 3 day weekend here in Cayman every year!

I thought I'd also share some goodies I picked up last week, starting with this candle!


I love these Mixture soy candles in Wild Currant. They are a little expensive at about $25 each, but they are totally worth it! They last for ages and seriously, one candle burning for about 20 minutes will make an entire room fragrant!

And it's a beautiful, simple white candle in a classic glass holder. So these go with any room. I love them! I'm not sure where else they're available, but here on Grand Cayman, they are sold at Bedside Manor in Camana Bay.

I also got this adorable pillbox. I'm prone to occasional headaches, especially with island heat and low pressure weather, so I keep Advil in my purse at all times. How cute is this for putting a few tablets in?

I hope all your weeks started off great today!

xoxo,

Pink Julep!

A Mist in the Air

Air fresheners are handy to have in the house and not just for the bathroom. Impromptu knock on the door and no candles lit? 2 quick sprays of the air fresheners from Bath & Body Works and the entire room can smell like a fragrant garden! These last FOREVER too! I bought some before we moved here in 2 different flavors and I still have both bottles! Since only 2 squirts will freshen an entire room for hours, there's no need to spray all the time!

My favorite is Sweet Pea!

But I also love Coconut Lime Verbena, especially here in the Caribbean!

I love a fragrant house and I often burn candles, however these are my favorite quick fix. How do you keep your home fresh and aromatic?

xoxo,

Pink Julep!

This and That

Source

I have been a woman on a mission for the past week, hence the lack of blogging. There's a lot going on in that we decided to replace all our bedroom storage, since our previous temporary solutions were a lot more temporary than we thought and started falling apart. In doing that, I decided to purge and clean our flat so I've been very busy! I decided to try this Thai Orchid candle by Febreeze. It's amazing! It smells lovely and tropical, just perfect for summer and it really does make the whole flat smell nice! For only GBP 6.41, it's worth every penny and burns for 30 hours! It's also lovely to look at as it comes in a nice glass jar with no labels, so it doesn't look like your typical air freshening candle! It's a great alternative for every day, since I don't want to use my fancy expensive candles all the time for obvious reasons.

My husband gave me this Intelligence Deck for Christmas in my stocking a few years ago and I have never had the opportunity to read any of it. It's great! Filled with lovely cards, this deck tells all ladies who aim to be chic what they need to know including how to convert Farenheit to Celcius, how to say hello in several languages, how to pronounce often mispronounced words, the various art and music movements, and ballet terminology to name a few. This would make an excellent small gift for someone. I only found it on one website. Click here for more information.

As I said, we decided to replace the storage in our bedroom. The average flat in England doesn't have a built-in closet, which is something I'm very used to being an American. While most furnished flats would provide a certain amount of drawers and wardrobes, I chose to move into a more unfurnished flat so that I could decorate according to our tastes. In the beginning we couldn't figure out what pieces we could invest in to maximize the small space so we bought some temporary units to give us some time to figure out what we wanted. We had no idea the temporary units would start falling apart in less than 4 months. So last weekend we were faced with making some serious decisions about what we would buy and I'm very happy with our choice. This is our chest of drawers.

We decided on 2 matching wardrobes and they're perfect! I love that they have drawers at the bottom for even more storage.

I also finally got a full-length mirror, something I've now been living without for quite some time! These Cheval style mirrors seem to be very popular here in London and I can see why. They take up minimal space and you can adjust them quite easily.

Once we put all our clothes away, we discovered there was no room in the wardrobes for our shoes. Major emergency as far as I'm concerned! We opted for an expandable cheap shoe rack and to be honest, it's not Carrie Bradshaw's amazing shoe closet, but for now it does the job and it looks tidy. Once the shoe collections start increasing rapidly, we can buy another to stack on top of this one. I actually like it, because my pet peeve is not being able to see my shoes clearly.

All in all I'm in love now. Our room looks great, it's comfortable and it seems like 20 times bigger now. I'm glad that we waited to make a real decision! All we need now for our bedroom are a few things to hang on the wall. I am pretty particular about decorations, so I suppose that collection will grow with time.

Now that the flat is finally sorted, I am focusing on other important things. All the admin tasks of our move are pretty sorted at this stage, so I can take time to find things for us to do and get involved in. I'm going back to dance classes this week and starting to explore and think about what I'd like to do professionally in the future.

In other news, I've started writing on my second blog again. I will be posting all my OOTD's on that blog from now on so hop on over and visit Pink Julep's Dressing Room!

Pink Julep Grab Bag

I needed a new pair of workout shoes. A few weeks ago, I got the most adorable red retro style Nike's for casual walks and sightseeing days, but they wouldn't cut it for any heavy amount of exercise, so I got these black and pink New Balance 760 Lightweight Trainers from Amazon.co.uk and I love them!!! They are not running shoes. Running shoes are specifically designed for forward motion. These trainers are great for stationary aerobic activity, walking, dance aerobics and anything else I would be doing regularly.

I have really been enjoying my Dyptique candle! I love to burn it when I am getting ready to go out!

I picked up a copy of Whitney Port's book the other day... I didn't even know it was out yet. This should be interesting to read this summer...

I also grabbed this adorable Rob Ryan water bottle. In case you aren't familiar, Rob Ryan is a famous cutout artist.

I am proud of what I had for lunch yesterday so I thought I'd share. It was Meatless Monday and this week is the first time I've successfully gotten through a whole Monday without meat for breakfast, lunch or dinner. This southwestern rice dish was really easy to make. I kind of made it up so I thought I'd share. I only ate about 1/2 of this, so I would recommend the recipe below for 2.

Ingredients:

Long grain white rice (1 cup measured when dry)

Juice of 1 lime

1 to 2 Tblsp Olive Oil

1/2 cup boiled water

Frozen sweet corn

1/2 Can of Kidney Beans (I used organic, but any will do)

1 garlic clove minced

1/2 package of powdered fajita mix

Salt & Pepper

Crushed chillis

Method:

1. Boil the rice according to package directions, strain and return to the pan. Cover to keep warm if rice is done before topping.

2. In a frying pan or wok, heat enough Olive Oil to coat the bottom of the pan. Add garlic and stir on med-high heat until tender and starting to brown. Pour in Lime juice. Mix well. Add powdered fajita mix and boiling water. Add corn and kidney beans. Mix well and bring to a boil. Salt & Pepper and add a small sprinkling of crushed chillis. Simmer for about 5 minutes or until desired thickness.

3. Serve beans and corn over rice with chips and salsa on the side.

We also had a lovely dinner last night for Meatless Monday! Penne with Edimame! It was delicious, super filling and probably just about the greenest dish that's ever reached my table, since I have the taste of a 6 year old. I got this recipe from French Women For All Seasons by Mireille Guiliano. The recipe calls for farfalle (bowtie pasta), but I didn't have any and penne worked fine! I found the recipe on the authors website, so you can find it here.

I've implemented Meatless Monday (or at least one meatless dinner per week - usually more) in our routine because I've read such great things about it. By going meatless for 1 day per week, you can reduce your carbon footprint, improve your health, and reduce your risk of cancer and other ailments. I'm now trying to be completely meatless one day per week (i.e. no meat for breakfast or lunch either) and even though I don't really like vegies, it's actually not that difficult! For more information on Meatless Monday, click here.

A Little This and That

Sorry for the infrequent posting lately. It's been insane around here with guests visiting and other things going on. I hope things are getting back to normal now. I thought I would clue you all in to what's been going on. We finally went to ASDA, the British version of Walmart. Wally World in my opinion is much better, but ASDA is great and super cheap! I love it and you can get some American sweets and foods that I haven't been able to find elsewhere so needless to say, we'll be going back, if for nothing else than a bag of M&M's, one of my favorite candies that I can never find here in London.

Yesterday my 3 disc Tracy Anderson boxed set came in the post and I'm so excited... okay, honestly I'm scared. I'm super out of shape, but the nice thing about DVD's is that it won't be embarrassing if I need to scale back like it would be in a public class. I hope these will jumpstart my fitness so I can feel good about doing group classes later on and get fit!!!

I'm really enjoying my new blender! My husband is too... we're smoothy junkies! I love that I can trick myself into ingesting foods I normally don't like by blending them together!

I'm currently obsessed with this Yumchaa Mango Sunrise Green Tea. It's loose tea that we bought at a market on King Street a while back. I don't normally care much for mango, but this tea is delicious!

I saw a lot of fashion & beauty bloggers using Rimmel London nail polishes, so I decided to try one. These are soooooo cheap! I decided I would try a trend color like coral, something I want to wear this summer, but may not necessarily wear in the long term. The color is Apricot Punch and it's lovely and vibrant. This polish is also scented. I don't mind the scent, it is actually quite nice, but I can definitely tell the difference between this polish and a more expensive brand. It's a bit thin in coverage and I had to really layer it on, but for the price tag, I love Rimmel London Lasting Finish polish and I would buy it again.

I'm really into spring colors. This is Barry M Pure Turquoise. The Barry M nail polishes are also super cheap and I like them a lot better than most other drugstore brands. I think I'm going to get a lot of wear out of this turquoise color this summer!

Right before my mother-in-law came to stay, I decided to finally invest in a desk. We desperately needed a home for our business and laptop. I assembled both the desk and chair.

And this is what it looks like now! It's the perfect blogging corner, right by our window where I can sit and get inspired while watching the world go by! I need to get something to hang on the wall over the desk and I'm thinking about some sort of memo board or cork board where I can put notes, reminders and inspiring photos!

We also invested in a tv recently. We didn't get any sort of service or cable. We are dvd people! Not having cable has made us so productive! Also, we both detest commercials, so dvd's are the way forward for us!

All the trees in our neighborhood of Putney are blooming. This time of year is just gorgeous in London!

I bought these rings from Accessorize recently and I'm obsessed with them. I'm wearing one or two of them nearly every day. Also, the polish color is Barry M Spring Green, which I wore for St. Patrick's Day.

Well, that's all I've got for the moment! I hope you've all been having a lovely weekend!