July blues

Hi folks, I'm back from my hols! Can you believe it's nearly August? The summer goes so fast! Portugal was beautiful! We stayed in a place on the coast called Quarteira which is pretty much a beach with some shops and restaurants built up around it. All we did was lie around, eat, swim, eat and rest. It was perfect!

Apart from swimwear, the skirt in this picture is the only item of clothing I bought for my holiday. I'm really reluctant to buy summer clothes that I'll only wear once, so I always look for things that I can layer once I get back to Ireland and wear again.

Also I have a question for all of you bloggers! Which image hosting service do you use for your blogs? I just switched from Photobucket to Flickr and I'm finding it really confusing. Why does Flickr make it so hard to post images at the size you uploaded them at? I have seen a few bloggers recommend Flickr and I'm not sure why. Which site do you use? Another one entirely? Let me know!

Lovely things 4

The weather in Dublin has been completely insane for the past month - according to the Met office it was the wettest June on record. It makes it very difficult to take outfit photos! I'm off to the Algarve (south of Portugal tomorrow) so hopefully I'll be back soon with a nice tan to show off in some new outfit posts. For the moment, here are some more lovely things..

I adapted the Kate Davies owls pattern that I used for my owl jumper to make a little phone case for a friend of mine. I think it worked out pretty well! (If I do say so myself). I wanted to make a cute gif animation showing a phone coming out of the case but I realised that I can't take a photo of my phone, with my phone.. oh dear.

Photo by Use Real Butter

I've become a little bit obsessed with making banana icecream. I don't eat dairy products but frozen bananas make a really, really good icecream substitute! If you've never tried it, you'll be surprised by how creamy it tastes and you don't even need to add other ingredients. The recipe above from Use Real Butter suggests adding peanut butter or cocoa though, which both sound amazing!

Bookworm dress by the Velvet Bird

I'm sure lots of you are already aware of the beautiful Velvet Bird blog and her store. But if not, how sweet is this dress? Especially the elbow patches! I'm dying to order from her... one day, one day.

Since I'm off on holiday, I've spent a lot of time looking for interesting swimwear - how amazing is this swimsuit from We Are Handsome? Unfortunately, a) I don't live near a stockist and b) the range seems to be very expensive. But still, I don't know why there has to be such a large gap between the cheap high-street swimsuits that are basically a triangle of fabric held up with string, and the expensive designer swimsuits that look like they might be designed to flatter or be used for actual swimming. It's really hard to find something that's both nice and reasonably priced!

Finally, my friend Dorota has started an awesome style blog called Girl Scout. I highly recommend you check it out, she's just started but she looks like a total blogging pro. I think she's going places!

I hope every one is having a sunny July, do you have any travel plans?