Happy Burns Night!

I hadn’t planned to do this today, then I felt guilty because I’d done Chinese New Year on Monday and I do like a nice haggis supper on Burns Night, so I thought in the interests of fairness I’d take a look at Tartan today!

Burns Night is poet Robert Burns birthday on the 25th January and started being held around the early 1800s after Burns death. It includes speeches, toasts, poetry readings, and, importantly, Haggis. If you haven’t tried haggis you really should. It sounds disgusting but I think it’s delicious with a spicy oaty flavour.

But onto Tartan! I was a big fan of tartan mini skirts and trousers when I fancied myself a punk in the 90s, but since then I’ve reserved it mostly for pyjamas and the occasional shirt I’m afraid. I’ve fancied a full tartan skirt for a few years, but not been able to find one I could afford and my seamstress skills just aren’t up to, well, anything!

I’ve dug out some vintage photos of women in Tartan, though they were surprisingly harder to find than I expected.

And a few places to pick up some tartan of your very own. (Top tip, wool tartan skirts are a common Charity Shop find)

1940s Tartan print dress – £78.98 on Etsy

1950s Tartan Cloak – £28.30 on Etsy

Tartan Wool Ladies Skirt - £55 on eBay

For the more sizing flexible world of vintage repro we’re back to Vivien of Holloway who has the most amazing tartan pencil skirts.

Tartan Wiggle Skirt – £45 Vivien of Holloway

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Happy Chinese New Year!

Today is Chinese New Years Day, and apparently it is the year of the Dragon which is regarded as an auspicious symbol which stands for power, good luck, success, and happiness. So fingers crossed for that then!

The Chinese Cheongsam dress is a classic, so today I’ve found some beautiful vintage photographs of women in cheongsam, and some places you can buy one for yourself if you fancy a bit of oriental vintage style. Some of these photographs have been in my inspiration folder for a while, but a lot of them are from the wonderful website about Chinese entertainment history called Soft Film

If you want your own Cheongsam here are a few suggestions:

1950s Shaheen Chongsam – Currently £19.95 on eBay

1940s/50s Cheongsam – £31.74 on Etsy

1960s Midnight Blue Cheongsam – £37.02 on Etsy

Emerald Green Cheongsam with matching Coat – £92.56 on Etsy

Or course, many of these are tiny sizes, so here’s a couple of modern reproduction suggestions if you need a bit more flexibility with sizing!

ChineseDresses.co.uk has a selection of dresses, and says they can be made to measure. I’ve not ordered from them, so can’t vouch for them, but this dress does look beautiful.

Short Chinese Dress – Starts at £65

Alternatively the dragon print halter neck sarong dress from Vivien of Holloway has the right look, especially when worn with the matching bolero.

Dragon Print Sarong Dress with matching bolero – £140

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Ah January, here you are.

With your promises of fresh starts, your good intentions and your freezing cold weather.

If you’re anything like me then you probably start January every year feeling a bit bloated, tired, very poor and filled with good intentions. In fact, you’re looking forward to early morning runs in the icy cold and lots of salad.

For 2 or 3 days anyway.

It’s tempting to start a New Year with the urge to change everything. However, while Christmas and New Year tends to be a time of gluttonous debauchery and spendthriftery that would shame us any other time of year, there are some positive behaviour changes we tend to make over Christmas that it might just be worth hanging on to.

I’ve picked 4, that I’m sure I do more over Christmas, and I’m pretty sure a lot of other people do too.

• Treating every day like it’s special

I bet on Christmas Day you ate off your best china and drank from the crystal glasses. Perhaps you just got dressed nicely and ate at the table when you weren’t even leaving the house. Maybe you made sure your pyjamas were all matching and colour coordinated. Or maybe you just lit your best smelly candles so the house smelt nice.

You should do that all the time. Really.

Making yourself feel special in little ways should be an everyday thing. Everyone deserves to feel good, and there’s no sense in sitting around waiting for someone else to do it.

• Staying in touch with friends and family

I’m terrible at staying in touch with people, and I spend a lot of time feeling guilty about it too. In fact, I’m so awful that I don’t even remember to send Christmas Cards and I have 3 years worth that I’ve bought in my decorations box *gulp*

At Christmas and New Year though we do often find ourselves renewing friendships in other little ways. We send New Year texts, special Twitter thank yous and we might find ourselves “liking” more Facebook statuses. We tend to reflect and think about all the people we love and how we’d like to see more of them.

Well KEEP IT UP! This year I’m trying to make plans for how I might actually get to SEE some of those people this year, instead of missing them at Christmas and then getting caught back up in  the hurly burly of every day life.

• Buying good food

I bet at Christmas you also bought the Taste the Difference Cave Aged Extra Mature Cheddar, instead of one of those huge rubbery blocks. You might have bought a box of fancy decorated Belgian Chocolates and I bet you bought real, extra thick, luxury double cream instead of Elmlea.

If you buy the fancy cheese that actually tastes nice you’ll need less of it, eat less of it, and ultimately consume fewer calories and lose weight. But you won’t feel deprived, you’ll feel like it’s a treat. Happy people don’t comfort eat entire family sized pizzas and then despise themselves for not sticking to their lettuce leaf and ice water diet. Well, not every day.

Moderation is key, of course it IS possible to consume an entire box of Belgian chocolates in one sitting, I know, I’ve done it. Hopefully the treat element, and the cost, will help you with your moderation. You couldn’t afford to do it everyday, where as a daily bar huge bar of Dairy Milk could easily be within most people’s budgets!

• Eating proper meals

Most people eat 3 meals a day over most of the Christmas period, and a lot of them are eaten sat at a table that’s spent the rest of the year covered in piles of mail.

Christmas gluttony is bad. An awful lot of people also spent Christmas eating an entire chocolate orange in one sitting and wondering where that tube of Pringle’s they got out as a mid afternoon snack could possibly have gone.  If you want to feel less bloated in January then skip the snacks and junk, but hang onto those good eating habits you acquired through December.

Stews, chillis, steaks and fresh veg are far less depressing than a prawn salad and less likely to leave you reaching for the takeaway menu. Eat them sat at the table and actually concentrate on your dinner and you’ll find yourself wanting to snack less and losing even more weight.

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