THAT TIME WE DROVE FROM GLASGOW TO STAVANGER

If you follow me on Instagram you will have seen a series of pictures from our recent journey from Scotland to Norway. In order to move our dog Bo from the UK to Norway, we decided it would be easiest/cheapest/best for Bo to drive her over. She’s a nervous dog and transporting her by plane ended up seeming a lot more hassle then what it was worth. And if we were driving over, we figured we’d be able to load up the car and take a chunk of our stuff over too. So we got Bo a passport, filled the car with as much stuff as we could, and embarked on our journey. Graeme was the driver, I was the DJ/documentary maker/dog watcher/navigator (in that order). In order to make the trip more of a holiday and less of a drive for hours and hours on end, we stopped in quite a few cities throughout Europe. Bo has now become quite the worldly dog, having gone for walks and sniffed butts all over Europe (check out the hashtags #botravels or #boview on instagram).

We ended up travelling a total of 1,580 miles (over 2,540 km) starting off in Scotland and going through England, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark before we boarded the ferry to Norway. You’d think going through a total of 8 countries in 5 days would have left us feeling a bit travelled out, but I think if anything it just gave us a taste for more!

MAY ON INSTAGRAM

So with only one out of the weeks in May being a full work week this year because of all the public holidays, May absolutely flew by. I spent a week in Glasgow and managed to catch up with some old friends and spend a lot of time with Graeme and Bo. Also celebrated Norway Day in Edinburgh, went to a beer tasting at Lervig Aktiebryggeri, got a new haircut, visited the Ullandhaug tower (aka Toothbrush Tower) and worked at the Stavanger Live festival. Busy, busy!

With our upcoming road trip around Europe, I have a feeling June is going to fly by as well!

PHOTO ADVENTURES BOOK

I have spent the past coulpe of days painting furniture. A table with six chairs, to be exact, that I bought from a local priest who was moving home. I will no doubt be doing a post on that once it's finished and actually in the kitchen, but currently I'm a little fed up with all the sanding and all the coats and all the pernickety details on the chairs, so I'm taking a break and decided to write about this awesome photo book I started last year and finally managed to get finished.

Graeme and I have a rather large collection of toy cameras. We love going on photo adventures, where we take the dog, grab a couple of analog cameras and just go somewhere and explore. Since we've been doing it for years, we've got quite the collection of photographs that have just been sitting on our harddrive for the longest time. Sound familiar?

Obviously something had to be done, so I decided to make a photo book with photos from all of the photo adventures Graeme and I have gone on as a couple before we got engaged, photos from 2008 to 2012. I've always enjoyed looking through old photo albums, and I suppose photo books are pretty much the photo albums of today. So I browsed a couple companies online that make them and eventually settled for a company called Blurb and started making one. 

The free software was easy to use and gave a lot of freedom in terms of layouts and design, as you could make your own layout templates as well as use the ones provided. I chose the option of a nice hardback square 18 cm by 18 cm book with a black book cloth, and charcoal endsheets. It also came with a dust jacket, but I'm not really a fan of dust jackets so I didn't keep it. I think the only thing I feel could have been better is if they had the option to print the title on the hardback cover (potentially in stead of the dust jacket).

I absolutely love the result though, and will definitely be making tons more of these! I've already started my next one with all the photos from our roadtrip holiday to California in 2011, and I plan on making one for our trip around Spain last summer, as well as a photo adventures volume two.

The book finishes with the two pictures below, which have a bit of a funny story to them. I mentioned that the photo book consists of photos from all the photo adventures Graeme and I have gone on as a couple before we got engaged, and these two photos were the last photos taken just before he proposed. The photo to the left is the view we were admiring as we sitting on a cliff in Hausvik in southern Norway, right before Graeme popped the question. And the photo to the right was actually taken seconds before. In fact, he is actually sitting there holding the ring in his hand as I'm taking the photo. I had no idea when I took it of course, which makes me enjoy the photo all the more.

And this is the main reason it took me so long to finish the book, because I wanted it as the final photo and it took so long to get it developed. I was so nervous that it wouldn't turn out, as the Diana Mini I took it with has a tendency to be a bit temperamental with me. Months ago, I developed a bunch of films and totally panicked when I realised that this particular roll of film wasn't in it. I thought I had lost it until I realised it was just still in the camera (phew!). And then when I finally finished the film I had a whole lot of trouble when I went to get it developed and printed and was left with only the negatives to tease me (I ranted lots about it here), so it wasn't until this April when I finally got them printed.

But alas, here it is! And it was totally worth the wait!

PEN PAL PAINTNG EXCHANGE PROJECT

And just like that, I'm back from my break in Glasgow. It went by so ridiculously quickly! I got to meet up with lots of lovely people though, and got to spend a lot of quality time with Graeme and Bo. If you follow me on Instagram, you're probably fed up with all the dog pictures by now! I'm already missing them both, but will be back in just three weeks so I should survive. And then the three of us will be driving from Glasgow to Stavanger, which will be an adventure and a half!

Seeing as I have today off as well (another public holiday, woo!), I have spent the day unpacking and chilling out in my duvet with a cup of rose hip tea and catching up on my favorite blogs. Is there anything better when the rain's pouring outside?

And while doing this, I came across the Pen Pal Painting Exchange Project and decided to sign up for it. Basically, you sign up and they send you a pre-gessoed and ready to hang 4 x 4 canvas as well as a notecard where you write a bit about yourself. You paint the canvas and fill in some details and send it back to them, and they match you up with someone and the two of you swap paintings. I'm very excited and cannot wait to get my canvas in the post. I used to have lots of pen pals when I was a kid, and would love to have one again, especially one I exchange art pieces with! Think I might just spend the rest of my day doodling and trying to decide what to paint!

CHAIR MAKEOVER

I don’t know if you remember a few months ago, I wrote a post about some of the stuff I had inherited from my grandmother. One of the things I inherited was this chair and I briefly mentioned how in the 60's my mother painted the interior of my grandmothers summer cottage a bright orange. After this summer house was sold, this chair was the last remaining bit of orange. We used to spend most summers in this orange house when I grew up, and I loved how this chair was the last piece of this childhood memory. However, as it's over 50 years since it had been painted it definitely needed a new lick of paint! For a while I contemplated painting it mint green, but eventually decided to go for a lovely bright pink. I thought it’d be a nice pop of color, and I’m pretty happy with the result! Here's the before and after (with a fluffy pillow):