Monday, 23 July 2012

My weekend - emotional brilliance, produce and the princess

Multicoloured curtain
Friday night started the weekend off nicely. I went to my local Lush store to get a preview of their new Emotional Brilliance range of make up. I was particularly keen to attend because (leaving my passion for Lush products) I'd been told all the products were vegan (and this was correct). Plus the staff are very lovely people who don't do hard sell. In fact they often seem delightfully surprised when you do want to buy something!

Food and drink
The marketing for range links colours with words and emotions and makes nice use of dry ice and popular psychology. I was slightly surprised when I got to spin the wheel that I didn't choose any shades of green. I was also rather taken with the three emotions that I'd picked (ambition, success, confidence - photo further down of these colours on the wheel).

Emotional brilliance colour wheel in action
Anyway marketing aside the products are excellent. Nice packaging which is not excessive and largely recyclable. Limited nasties lurking in said products (including the mascara). Oh and did I mentions it's all vegan?

Emotional brilliance products
Based on my experience (leaving Lush, heading home via pub and curry with various friends and then falling into bed without removing make up) it stays on very well but comes off fine with a blob of Almond Oil. Expect to see me wearing very bright red lipstick for the foreseeable future.

Princess doll and lots of mattresses
Saturday I was on a mission. I needed to finish the Princess and the Pea set I was making for my niece. I obviously subconciously knew from the start that I was going to make loads of mattresses (I'd originally planned to do 6-8). The bag I'd made for it to go in seemed enormous initially but actually doesn't have much space left once you fill it with 1 mini pillow, 1 mini quilt and 14 mini mattresses.

Handmade bag
Anyway I thrilled when I finished it right down to checking all the hems and snipping off all the threads.

Wheel of mattresses
And it would seem all those hours of toil on the land were worth it. This week from the allotment I bought home Rocket, raspberries, huge peas, rhubarb and a handful of potatoes and onions. I could of had Spinach too but wasn't sure I'd get round to eating it with so much other stuff on offer.

Vegetables from the allotment
Continuing on a food theme I found some Samphire in a local shop on Saturday. I'd never tried it before (to my knowledge) but for a salt addict like myself it's a dream come true.

I also found time to finish off a couple of novels. I realised a few weeks ago that I'd never read any of the Tarzan novels. So I ordered Tarzan of Apes from the library. It was much better than I expected. Fast moving and quite funny in places. It did have some rather outdated ideas but wasn't as bad as I'd feared. What did annoy me was how Tarzan kept his knife sharp (through. Decade or so of use. It even gets left in the rain and goes rusty). I was willing to go with the plot that had Tarzan teaching himself to read (but not speak English) via an illustrated dictionary. However I couldn't work out how this would enable him to learn write his name. Anyway to will certainly be reading more of this series.

I absolutely devoured Replay by Ken Grimwood. It's the story of a man who dies only to find he is reliving his life over and over again. A really interesting exploration of what choices we would make if we could do things again, if it would make a differences and he restrictions we put on our lives.

So a slightly less packed weekend than usual but one that has left me feeling refreshed and ready for week of sunshine.

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