Don't you just love it when two of your favourite things come together? I got all excited back in November with the vintage map washi tape that I found at Bureau Direct, but now I think the team there must have realised that a love of stationery and maps goes hand in hand as look at what I've found now. This Paperways Handy MemoPad comes with a map of Europe on it and is just the perfect size for keeping handy in the kitchen and writing a shopping list or similar on. There's a world map version too (although the map is obviously at 90 degrees to the way up you'd normally have the pad - ... read more
When notebooks go technical… #StationeryWednesday
When you think of notebooks in this modern age they're often seen as being a bit old fashioned and quaint, especially when you talk to people who keep all their notes digitally on their smart phone. But then again many of us like this old fashioned way of connecting pen with paper and I find that my brain flows somewhat better with a pen in my hand than it does at the keyboard. Possibly a strange thing for a blogger to say, but I find that some of my best blog posts come when I've sat down and made handwritten notes first. In these days of cloud computing and backing up everything though ... read more
Embracing real ink #StationeryWednesday
I'm loving my current work with Bureau Direct. Not only do I get to choose what to review every month from a fantastic range of stationery goodies, but I'm also rediscovering how much I love writing with a pen - something that I suppose I've gradually stopped doing seeing as I spend so much time on a laptop or tablet. After embracing ink pens these last two months - both the Herbin rollerball and the the Lamy Vista - it seemed like there was just one ink challenge to overcome: real ink. Bottles of ink scare and thrill me in equal measure. At primary school I remember one boy Amit who ... read more
Rediscovering my love of a fountain pen #StationeryWednesday
As regular readers of Being Mrs C will know, I am delighted to be part of a team of six bloggers that are currently working with Bureau Direct - retails of some of the most gorgeous stationery products I've ever seen. But to me stationery isn't just about things that look good, whilst that is still important. It's about functionality. This has to be the case when it comes to pens in particular. There's no point in having a pen that looks good if it's horrible to write with. This month my choice of review items from Bureau Direct was very much on the functional side of things. After my ... read more
Easy Washi Tape Christmas Cards
It may not be the trendy thing to say, but I love Christmas and I particularly love all the build up excitement. I see nothing wrong with starting off all the Christmas crafts and activities as soon as Halloween is out of the way and that's certainly what we're doing here this year. I'm trying to come up with activities that the children can get involved in which are not only fun, but also have an educational value. If they also produce something that can be used as a Christmas decoration or gift then even better. To kick off all my festive crafting I came up with a washi tape Christmas ... read more
Washi Tape decorated Vintage Maps Storage
My mum is about to move house, and as she's downsizing she's spent the last few months having a huge clear out of all the stuff that the family has accumulated over the years. It's fair to say that I think none of us had any idea just how much stuff there was in her house, garages and outbuildings. As part of this my sister and I have been helping where we can by taking a few things off her hands, especially things that we have fond childhood memories of. I've always been a huge fan of maps, vintage ones in particular (and that passion was reawakened by the relevant vintage Ladybird ... read more
Notebooks, notebooks everywhere… #LOVEstationery
As someone who writes notes about pretty much everything in life it does sometimes feel that my house is full of notebooks - but it's something I'm definitely not complaining about. I've always been someone who likes to write things down in the old-fashioned way, whether it be craft ideas, lists of things that need doing, or just things I need to remember and I always seem to have several notebooks on the go. It was therefore obvious that I was going to choose a notebook or two to go in my first stationery order from Bureau Direct. But, the decision over which to choose took me a while to ... read more
What happens when a stationery addict discovers Bureau Direct #LOVEstationery
I think I must have been in Year 1 at primary school when I first discovered that stationery could be so much more than just functional pencils and sheets of plain paper. There I was one day when Lucie came in with a pretty floral pencil case. Suddenly this strange urge over took me and I just knew that I needed a matching one. I remember dragging my mum to the local branch of WH Smiths and desperately scanning the shelves to find one the same. I failed. My mum even tried to make one for me from the description I gave her, and whilst it was nice it just wasn't the same. But, my eyes had ... read more
Review: The Sticker Club
So, whilst it seems that boys go mad for diggers, I think the equivalent thing for little girls has to be stickers and Little Miss C seems to have been obsessed with them since she was very young indeed. At first it was the physical act of just sticking them anywhere that exited her. Since then it's moved on to how the stickers actually look and then spending ages creating pictures with them, or using them to decorate things. I remember when I was a child collecting stickers and actually being too afraid to stick them on to anything in case it ruined my collection. I also recall sticker ... read more